Informed consent. Evaluation of the information provided to patients before anaesthesia and surgery

The procedure for obtaining informed consent is often poorly appreciated by patients. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the verbal information given as part of the informed consent process before anaesthesia and surgery. A total of 300 randomly chosen patients (141 male and 159 female) were asked their opinion between 1993 and 1995 at the University of Murcia Hospital (Murcia, Spain). One hundred and fifty of these patients received scheduled surgery and the other 150 received emergency surgery. In general, the patients were not happy with the information they had received concerning their pathology and treatment. Although they had signed the consent documents, the patients did not feel they had really understood the risks involved in the surgery they had undergone.