If you’ve not been warned, you’re not informed!
Informed consent matters.
We all know that ‘consent’ is vital for any course of action to be both morally and legally valid. But did you know, where it comes to medical decisions, ‘consent’ alone is not enough? Medicine in the UK is governed by the Montgomery ruling, which underlines the necessity – not just of consent – but of informed consent. If a patient doesn’t give their fully informed consent to a treatment, then those who administer it could be acting illegally.
So, what is informed consent?
According to official UK healthcare guidelines, informed consent means that doctors must provide patients with information about all material risks of a treatment. That means they must disclose any risk to which a reasonable person in the patient’s position would attach significance.
