Teaching Informed Consent: A Scoping Review

Informed consent discussions are a critical and routine task for surgeons and surgical trainees. Surgical trainees have reported they lack competence and confidence in obtaining consent. Despite its importance, there is no standardized training for medical students or surgery residents to learn skills for conducting informed consent discussions. Given the critical gap regarding informed consent education, 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. On 1/16/2025 the authors searched MEDLINE, Embase, ERIC, Education Source, Web of Science Core Collection, and MedEdPortal without date limitations for studies addressing informed consent education. Studies describing educational interventions to teach U.S. trainees were included. Studies reporting attitude, opinions, or beliefs without an educational intervention were excluded. The Arksey and O’Malley framework was applied to inform study stages and PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines followed. We identified 6,126 publications from databases, of which sixteen studies met criteria for data extraction. Graduate Medical Education learners were the focus of most studies. A wide range of teaching methods implemented by a variety of instructors including attending surgeons, risk management personnel, and peers were utilized. Defined elements of informed consent taught to learners was variable in the nine studies reporting definitions. There was no overlap of assessment tools used by any studies. Future efforts should address the fundamental problem of what defines informed consent elements and subsequently what and how to teach these elements to surgical learners.

Author dc:creator

• Carly G Sobol (23292061)

• surgical education
• informed consent

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-01-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451755.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451755