Patients' Perception of Quality of Pre-Operative Informed Consent in Athens,Greece: A Pilot Study

Background

We sought to perform a study to record and evaluate patients'' views of the way surgeons communicate informed consent (IC) in Greece.

Methodology/Principal Findings

A prospective pilot study was carried out in Athens from 9/2007 to 4/2008. The study sample was extracted from patients, operated by eight different surgeons, who volunteered to fill in a post-surgery self-report questionnaire on IC. A composite delivered information index and a patient-physician relationship index were constructed for the purposes of the analysis. In total, 77 patients (42 males) volunteered to respond to the questionnaire. The delivered information index scores ranged from 3 to 10, the mean score was 8, and the standard deviation (SD) was 1.9. All patients were aware of their underlying diagnosis and reason for surgery. However, a considerable proportion of the respondents (14.3%) achieved a score below or equal to 5. The patient-physician relationship scores ranged from 0 to 20, the mean score was 16 and the standard deviation (SD) was 4.3. The better the patient-physician relationship, the more information was finally delivered to the patient from the physician (Spearman''s rank-order correlation coefficient was 0.4 and p<0.001). Delivered information index was significantly higher among participants who comprehended the right to informed consent, compared to participants who did not (p<0.001), and among participants who were given information regarding other possible therapeutic options (p = 0.001). 43% of the respondents answered that less than 10 minutes were spent on the consent process, 58.4% of patients stated that they had not been informed about other possible therapeutic choices and 28.6% did not really comprehend their legal rights to IC.

Conclusions

Despite the inherent limitations and the small sample size that do not permit to draw any firm conclusions, results indicate that a successful IC process may be associated with specific elements such as the patient-physician relationship, the time spent by the physician to inform the patient, a participant''s comprehension of the right to IC and the provision of information regarding other possible therapeutic options.