An evaluation of the informed consent process for elective surgery at a university hospital

To evaluate on a limited scale the process and quality of the consenting process in our local environment following the increasingly important issue of informed consent and its validity to most physicians and hospital administrators in the face of an emerging litigious Nigeria society.

A 22 item questionnaire was administered on 60 consecutive patients admitted for elective surgery into the general and specialty surgical wards of the University College Hospital over a one month period.

No question in our study achieved the ideal standard of 100%. At the time of admission, 57 of the 60 patients knew their clinical diagnosis from the primary surgical team with 90% (n=54) of the subjects expressing varying degrees of satisfaction with the information they had on their condition. Only about 32% of the patients got additional information on the diagnosis and planned surgery from sources other than the admitting surgical team. In this group of participants there was no significant difference in the sufficiency of information obtained between the two sources (p > 0.05) Ninety percent of the subjects however preferred they had all the information about their operation much earlier than the pre-operation day. Patients satisfaction with overall information obtained during the consenting process was only 'very sufficient' in 35% of the cases.

Notwithstanding the information derived by patients from their primary surgeons in addition to alternate sources, satisfaction with overall information obtained was marginal at 35%. There is a need to look into methods of improving the process, quality and validity of informed consent.