"Let's Get the Consent Together": Rethinking How Surgeons Become Competent to Discuss Informed Consent

Abstract

Objective: Eliciting informed consent is a clinical skill that many residents are tasked to conduct without sufficient training and before they are competent to do so. Even senior residents and often attending physicians fall short of following best practices when conducting consent conversations.

Design: This is a perspective on strategies to improve how residents learn to collect informed consent based on current literature.

Conclusions: We advocate that surgical educators approach teaching informed consent with a similar framework as is used for other surgical skills. Informed consent should be defined as a core clinical skill for which attendings themselves should be sufficiently competent and residents should be assessed through direct observation prior to entrustment.

Keywords: Interpersonal and Communication Skills; Patient Care; Practice-Based Learning and Improvement; Professionalism; consent forms; continuing medical education; decision making; graduate medical education; informed consent; shared; surgery.