Control instruments in health law

This research project aimed to develop control structures for the health system within the framework of several interconnected conferences for a circle of young researchers of law and in cooperation with various guest speakers from the field. One conference each was dedicated to the important control mechanisms of competition, cooperation, and control, which are also relevant for the debate on reforms. Three to four members of the network analyzed and identified each control instrument in health law. Their contributions were discussed at the conference and subsequently published together with the results of these discussions. The participants were able to draw from their own research areas, for example tax law or environmental law, thereby introducing comparative intradisciplinary perspectives. This served the project's two primary objectives: to integrate health law, as part of social law, into general public law developments, and to establish health law as a useful field of reference for questions in general public law. An additional goal was to integrate practitioners in the health field in order to provide researchers with insight into the handling of concrete problems and to foster contact between scientists and practitioners for further research pursuits. The contributions of networking participants focus on central control issues in the health system. An especially useful academic finding is that the regulations observed within the health system may be tied to general public law developments in different ways depending on the perspective.

Publications:

Steuerungsinstrumente im Recht des Gesundheitswesens (German only), Eds. Arndt Schmehl and Astrid Wallrabenstein, Bd. 1: Wettbewerb, 2005, Bd. 2: Kooperation, 2006, Bd. 3 Kontrolle, 2007, both published by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen. As well as various individual publications.

Duration: October 2004–October 2007
Project leader: Prof. Dr. Arndt Schmehl, Prof. Dr. Astrid Wallrabenstein
External funding sources: German Research Foundation (DFG)