Professional status of medical workers in terms of criminal law

Introduction: this article considers civil law interventions in professional activity of medical workers. The penal prohibitions applied to persons engaged in medical practice can be assessed as one of the guarantees of their professional status. However, proper understanding of their essence and application mechanism demands clarifying the position of criminal law norms in the system of legal regulation of medical workers ’ professional status, since these legal norms are blanket and thus require reference to other branches of law. Purpose: to identify the range of civil law norms engaged in the legal regulation of medical practice, it is necessary to analyze the notion “medical worker ”, the scope and content of a medical worker’s professional status, and to suggest the authors ’ view of the grounds and conditions for including medical workers into the sphere of criminal law relations. Methods: the methodological framework of the research is based on a set of scientific methods, including the universal (dialectical) method, general scientific methods (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction), and methods specific to legal science (the method of comparative legal studies, technical legal and statistical methods). Results: legal theory and criminal law science do not pay enough attention to studying the criminal law framework of the professional status of medical staff. Publications, such as monographs and thesis works, deal with medical workers as participants in some particular legal relations. Therefore, scientific literature analyzes only some certain aspects of their legal status, e. g. as of subjects of criminal liability for professional crimes. Conclusions: to provide the consistency of legal norms, it is necessary to refine the normative notion “medical worker ” as introduced in Federal Law “On Fundamentals of Protection of Public Health in the Russian Federation” and to reduce the scope of professional duties of these persons to providing only medical assistance. Furthermore, it seems appropriate to regard the professional status of medical workers as the boundaries of their lawful professional behavior, which guarantees high-quality execution of their professional duties. Such an approach gives an opportunity to objectify the criminal law framework for the category ofpersons under consideration.