Many patients may not understand consent forms

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7500.1151-b

BMJ 2005;330:1151 (14 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7500.1151-b

Letter

Many patients may not understand consent forms

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—McKinney et al highlight an important issue—namely,the difficulty of obtaining truly informed consent.¹ This isa process that most surgeons engage in every day. The currentrequirement for informed consent is backed by a written recordof the consent process in the form of a standard consent formthat has been distributed by the Department of Health.²

Thousands of these forms are signed daily, but do we as doctorsever stop to consider how much of the form is read by patientsand for those who do read it, how much of it is understood?Standard readability measurements can be used to assess readability,the Flesch readability ease score being one of the most validated.A document scoring 65 or above is considered to be readablefor most adults. I found that the score for the entire textof the standard UK consent form is 45.1 and . . . [Full text of this article]

David D Pothier, specialist registrar in otolaryngology

Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, Gloucester GL1 3NN email@davepothier.com

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This article has been cited by other articles:

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