Fragile rights: rights consciousness in hospitals in times of crisis

Abstract

This paper examines rights consciousness (RC) in hospitals during emergencies, drawing on interviews with bereaved relatives and healthcare workers from isolated COVID-19 wards in Israel. It reveals that neither group framed visitation as a formal legal entitlement but rather as a privilege, gift, or luxury. While visitation is a routine and expected practice in ordinary times, the crisis exposed its fragility, transforming it into a discretionary allowance whose availability depended on institutional priorities and frontline discretion. Family responses ranged from compliance to selective resistance, with rights awareness often emerging retrospectively and collectively. The analysis advances few theoretical insights. First, it conceptualizes visitation as a “fragile right” robust in everyday practice yet weakly anchored in law and easily erased in crisis. Second, it shows how “de facto rights” can re-emerge from within institutions through professional ethics, norms, and informal organizational diffusion. Third, it demonstrates that RC is relational and spatial, suppressed inside hospitals by clinical hierarchies, yet reconstructed outside them through collective comparison and shared experience. These dynamics suggest that strengthening such fragile rights may depend not only on legal reform but on bottom-up participation of patient/family in hospital policymaking during crisis, which can cultivate rights awareness from within care itself.