A recent survey suggests that many psychiatry residents skip this step:
Rutherford and colleagues investigated the informed consent practices of 108 psychiatry residents by assessing their responses to clinical vignettes describing three hypothetical patients with major depression, borderline personality, or neurotic character traits.Only 8 of 324 completed vignette responses (3 percent) met the criteria for adequate informed consent, the authors report, and only 3 of 324 met criteria for optimal informed consent.
Related posts:
- Should the informed consent discussion be formally taught?
- Informed consent is central to the doctor-patient relationship
- Psychiatrists in Ethiopia
- What do psychiatrists think of the new ACP depression guidelines?
- He said, she said: Does informed consent discussions need to be videotaped?
- Darth Vader and personality disorder
- Psychiatrists
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 3 comments }
What criteria?
Ivory tower ideal criteria formulated by guys in offices who grace a ward once a month for a case conference?
Criteria writen by lawyers who don’t have to treat sick people?
Or criteria based on the standard of care meaning what the bulk of real practioners treating real patients find is practical and workable while respecting patients rights, as well as the fact that the organ with which they make decisions and process information is the one that is broken.
Informed consent in psychiatry is an art which in application is crafted to each clinical situation. I can believe that residents don’t do it well and need training–that is why they are residents. I just find it hard to imagine how one might formulate “criteria” that can measure that well.
In my opinion, this study sheds light why patients are losing trust in physicians.
If you learn on actors pretending to be patients, instead of real patients, you get these results.
Patients have different goals than actors who are trying to test the doctor. It’s a completely different sort of encounter.
Faith Fitgerald (from UC Davis) said it best:
“When I was a med student, the rule was “if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it was duck. Now we teach our students it’s actually a parrot”
Comments on this entry are closed.