Informed Consent in Pediatric Anesthesia: A Narrative Review

Informed consent for pediatric anesthesia challenges practitioners to navigate complex ethical, medical, and legal ambiguities. A patient's status as a minor does not negate the importance of his or her participation in the decision-making process but, rather, necessitates a nuanced evaluation of age and development to involve the patient to an appropriate extent. Given the complexities involved with pediatric informed consent in anesthesia practice and research, it is important to understand the experience of key stakeholders involved. For this review, we searched Medline, the Cochrane database, PROSPERO, and Clinicaltrials.gov for studies involving pediatric anesthesia informed consent. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were designed to select for studies that included issues related to informed consent as primary outcomes. The following data were extracted from included studies: title, authors, date of publication, study type, intervention, data collection method, participant type (ie, parent, pediatric patient, anesthesia provider), number of participants, pediatric patient age range, and primary outcome measures. Twenty-two articles were included for final review: studies of informed consent in pediatric anesthesia span many aspects of informed consent. Parental understanding has been studied most often (7/22 studies), followed by parental preferences (5/22 studies) and provider-related outcomes (5/22 studies) such as time spent interacting with patients, subjective reporting on amount of training related to informed consent, and provider satisfaction with the informed consent process. Outcomes pertaining to pediatric patients themselves constitute the smallest number of studies, including child anxiety (1/22), child understanding (1/22), and child refusal (1/22). Among the parties involved, parents have been most frequently identified as the subjects of these studies (2719/3805 subjects across all included studies, or 71% of all subjects). Pediatric patients are the least frequently involved subjects of studies that investigate informed consent in pediatric anesthesia (493/3805, or 13% of all subjects). Anesthesia providers and investigators have been study subjects (593/3805, or 16% of all subjects) for a range of topics including time spent interacting with patient, nature of informed consent conversation in relation to trainee status, satisfaction with informed consent process, and priorities for informed consent content. The aim of the present narrative review is to summarize the work that has been done on informed consent for pediatric anesthesia.