Criminal and Civil Liability for Refusing Emergency Medical Care in Indonesia: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Refusal or delay of emergency medical care raises questions about professional and institutional responsibility under Indonesian criminal and civil law. This systematic literature review, with acknowledged gaps in the original search documentation, maps legal duties, liability regimes, and operational barriers reported in Indonesian and comparative scholarship. The source retrieval, conducted through Elicit using Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex materials, reported 5,000 records and 59 included studies: 27 examined in full text and 32 assessed from abstracts only. A qualitative thematic synthesis identifies emergency-assistance duties, criminal prohibitions, civil remedies, professional and hospital accountability, emergency consent, insurance administration, and resource constraints. The synthesis distinguishes criminal and civil legal pathways from the separate allocation of responsibility between clinicians and facilities. It identifies tensions between formal duties of emergency assistance and institutional conditions affecting timely care, without inferring the prevalence of unlawful refusals or causation from secondary sources. Search dates, reproducible query strings, independent screening, and formal critical appraisal were not documented in the original research record. Accordingly, findings are interpreted as transparent evidence mapping rather than a fully reproducible systematic review. The article proposes a two-axis accountability framework to guide further doctrinal verification and policy research.