The advantages of nurse-led consent for dialysis in improving shared decision-making and obtaining legal consent
Jo-Anne Moodie, Elaine Sanders, Brett Sobey, Jade Ryan, Jayne Amy, Jenny Beavis, Adele Montgomery, Stephen G Holt
Renal Society of Australasia Journal, March 2021; 17(1) pp 4-9
Abstract
The treatment/medical consent procedure has generally been performed by doctors. Despite the recognised importance of the consent process, formal initial consent for maintenance dialysis was poorly performed at in our service and rarely performed thereafter. As a large renal unit with a commitment to excellence in patient care, we felt this was out of keeping with our remit and sought to change the process to ensure we delivered useful information to allow our patients to have a meaningful discussion around consent issues. We trained senior nurses to perform the reconsent process, and took the opportunity to reassess patients’ decision-making competence, discuss advance care planning, blood consent and personal data privacy issues. We demonstrated a large improvement in the number of patients having a valid dialysis consent form, and realised the potential of this procedure to improve the care we give to our patient group. We recommend the benefits of nurse-led consent for dialysis to other services.
Month: April 2021
Online Extremism and Terrorism Research Ethics: Researcher Safety, Informed Consent, and the Need for Tailored Guidelines
Online Extremism and Terrorism Research Ethics: Researcher Safety, Informed Consent, and the Need for Tailored Guidelines
Maura Conway
Terrorism and Political Warfare, 24 March 2021; 33(2) pp 367-380
Abstract
This article reflects on two core issues of human subjects’ research ethics and how they play out for online extremism and terrorism researchers. Medical research ethics, on which social science research ethics are based, centers the protection of research subjects, but what of the protection of researchers? Greater attention to researcher safety, including online security and privacy and mental and emotional wellbeing, is called for herein. Researching hostile or dangerous communities does not, on the other hand, exempt us from our responsibilities to protect our research subjects, which is generally ensured via informed consent. This is complicated in data-intensive research settings, especially with the former type of communities, however. Also grappled with in this article therefore are the pros and cons of waived consent and deception and the allied issue of prevention of harm to subjects in online extremism and terrorism research. The best path forward it is argued—besides talking through the diversity of ethical issues arising in online extremism and terrorism research and committing our thinking and decision-making around them to paper to a much greater extent than we have done to-date—may be development of ethics guidelines tailored to our sub-field.
Written Informed Consent-Translating into Plain Language. A Pilot Study
Written Informed Consent-Translating into Plain Language. A Pilot Study
Agnieszka Zimmermann, Anna Pilarska, Aleksandra Gaworska-Krzemińska, Jerzy Jankau, Marsha N Cohen
Healthcare, 20 February 2021; 9(2)
Open Access
Abstract
Background
Informed consent is important in clinical practice, as a person’s written consent is required prior to many medical interventions. Many informed consent forms fail to communicate simply and clearly. The aim of our study was to create an easy-to-understand form.
Methods
Our assessment of a Polish-language plastic surgery informed consent form used the Polish-language comprehension analysis program (jasnopis.pl, SWPS University) to assess the readability of texts written for people of various education levels; and this enabled us to modify the form by shortening sentences and simplifying words. The form was re-assessed with the same software and subsequently given to 160 adult volunteers to assess the revised form’s degree of difficulty or readability.
Results
The first software analysis found the language was suitable for people with a university degree or higher education, and after revision and re-assessment became suitable for persons with 4-6 years of primary school education and above. Most study participants also assessed the form as completely comprehensible.
Conclusions
There are significant benefits possible for patients and practitioners by improving the comprehensibility of written informed consent forms.
The Case for Consent Pluralism
The Case for Consent Pluralism
Jessica Keiser
Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2021
Abstract
A longstanding debate regarding the nature of consent has marked a tri-fold division among philosophical and legal theorists according to whether they take consent to be a type of mental state, a form of behaviour, or some hybrid of the two. Theorists on all sides acknowledge that ordinary language cannot serve as a guide to resolving this ontological question, given the polysemy of the word “consent” in ordinary language. Similar observations have been noted about the function of consent in the law and use of the word “consent” in legal contexts. This paper makes a parallel argument regarding consent’s characteristic normative role: roughly, to transform moral prohibitions into permissions. This role is neither unique nor essential to any one particular kind of thing, be it a mental state, form of behaviour, or hybrid of the two—rather, it is played by mental states and behaviour in independent and context-sensitive ways. The upshot is that insofar as we are interested in its normative implications, we ought to adopt a pluralistic approach to consent which gives independent weight to the moral contributions of facts about mental states and facts about behaviour relative to a context.
Center for Informed Consent Integrity 