Informed Consent In Health Care

People that work in the healthcare field, know that some things are hard to understand. Residents of a hospital sometimes forget that people that do not work within the healthcare field do not understand the “language they speak” so patients often have to ask what things mean. Informed Consent helps to do this. Before informed consent patients were often “put under the scalpel” not knowing whether they would make it out alive, and not knowing the benefits and risks of a procedure. Nowadays, Doctors and residents of the hospital are required by law, to make patients aware of the procedure they will be undergoing and all of the possible outcomes of the given circumstances. This is why Informed Consent has shaped the healthcare field in such astonishing …show more content…
“Informed consent is the process by which the treating health care provider discloses appropriate information to a competent patient so that the patient may make a voluntary choice to accept or refuse treatment” (Bord, Jessica De. et. al). By knowing this information, the physician can make it clear to the patient …show more content…
With healthcare always evolving, there is always room for improvement and change. Informed consent is a big factor in the evolving life as we know it. There are many things people don’t realize when going through the informed consent process, and some of these become problems. “According to publications, around 40–80% of medical information provided by healthcare practitioners is forgotten immediately” (Wasserzuga, Oshri, et. al.). This was proved through a clinical trial that was done to see how much information parents retained after going through the informed consent process for their child. “Based on our clinical experience, we hypothesized that parents do not comprehend all the information that is given to them by the surgeon at the time of the consent process” (Wasserzuga, Oshri, et. al.). The information that was forgotten or not comprehended throughout the informed consent process was vital to fully understanding the procedure their child would be going through. Within concluding this clinical trial, “some possible reasons for such lack of understanding include the stress that parents are experiencing when their child faces surgery, their fear of possible complications associated with the procedure and the surgeon's use of medical terms that they do not understand” (Wasserzuga, Oshri, et. al.). This shows that there is clear room for improvement for the