Healthcare professionals are expected to understand and apply medical regulations in their daily work. Swedish law governing medicine consists of vague rules, particularly regarding pediatric care. The Patient Act (2014:821), influenced by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, presents several challenges related to interpretation. Key questions arise regarding what should be encompassed within the concept of the “best interests of the child.” The situation is complicated by the fact that pediatric healthcare often involves qualified research across various pediatric subspecialties, regulated in different orders.

This presentation regards an ongoing research project on the implementation of medical law in the daily work among health care professionals at The Centre for Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine at Skåne University Hospital, in the south of Sweden. The project is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The main aim has been to investigate how healthcare professionals in Sweden interpret and apply the healthcare regulations' vague provisions regarding medical care of children.

The empirical material is gathered through a legal ethnography, where the researcher participates and observes the daily work in different clinics. Pediatricians and pediatric nurses are also interviewed. Legal realism serves as the theoretical base, highlighting legal pluralism and the difference between law in books and law in action. In practice, the written law does not dictate behavior top-down. Instead, the norms created in the daily work of the healthcare professionals is in the foreground. The approach is exploratory, where specific problems regarding legal implementation have been identified during the observations and interviews.