Page 158 - Human Rights

Faculty of Nursing
Adult care Nursing Department

Further, professionals still have a great deal of influence in the promotion of a culture that resists

managerialism.

Nevertheless, self-regulation still plays a major role in enforcing the ethical and clinical standards

of healthcare professionals and should be regarded as an integral part of the healthcare regulatory
system. In this book, Selznick’s (1985) definition of regulation is followed:

regulation of any social and/or economic sector is the “sustained and focused control exercised

by a public agency over activities which are valued by a community” (Selznick 1985).

This perspective clearly focuses regulation on the supervision and control of specific activities by

a public authority even though action in the public interest is usually considered to be paramount.

This conceptual perspective of regulation is in accordance with the changing role of the

government in most modern societies.

As Gian Domenico Malone (1997) points out, this gradual change is a distinctive feature of the
regulatory state.

This perspective of regulation should be distinguished from legislation strictures’ because of its

normative and prescriptive content (Rotenberg and Smart 2018).

Although abiding by the law is an ethical and social imperative, regulatory legislation intends to

oversee the relationships between different parties in a more general way.

That is, the regulation is restricted to specific economic areas and, therefore, is different from a

legislation in both theoretical and practical dimensions.

Judicial decisions are important drivers in healthcare policy because there is always the possibility

of legal recourse through an individual lawsuit.

136 Academic Year 2025/2026