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Teaching Informed Consent in Surgical Training: A Scoping Review
Carly G Sobol1, Gabrielle Moore2, Kimberly Kopecky3
1Department of Surgery, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, Wisconsin.
Objective:
There is no widely adopted, standardized approach for teaching surgical trainees how to obtain informed consent. Further, no broadly accepted standards exist to characterize the content of methods by which surgical trainees should be taught about conducting informed consent discussions. This scoping review aims to characterize and describe the currently available educational curricula designed to teach informed consent communication to surgical trainees, including medical students on surgery clerkships and surgery residents.
Design, Setting, And Participants:
A comprehensive search of 6 databases was performed on January 16, 2025 for relevant studies: MEDLINE, Embase, ERIC, Education Source, Web of Science Core Collection, and MedEdPortal. Studies describing educational interventions to teach U.S. undergraduate medical education (UME) and graduate medical education (GME) trainees surgical informed consent were included in this review. Editorials and opinion pieces, studies conducted outside of the U.S., and those focused on continuing medical education (CME) learners were excluded. This review followed the Arksey and O'Malley scoping review framework and was reported using the PRISMA-ScR guidelines.
Results:
The database search yielded 4337 unique studies of which 16 met criteria for inclusion. GME trainees were the focus of interest for most studies. A wide range of teaching methods were implemented by a variety of instructors, including attending surgeons, risk management personnel, and peer educators. 56% of studies (n = 9) reported an informed consent definition including elements of informed consent discussions they taught to trainees. 44% of studies used validated assessment tools (n = 7) to assess interventional impact and there was no overlap of assessment tool utilization between studies.
Conclusions:
This scoping review highlights wide variation in how informed consent is taught, assessed, and evaluated across surgical training. Future efforts should define pedagogical standards for teaching informed consent principles to surgical trainees so that they learn to communicate information in ways patients can understand.