Korean Journal of Medical Ethics
The Korean Society for Medical Ethics
Article

의사의 설명동의 의무와 설명동의서의 구비요건

유호종1
Ho-Jong YU1
1연세대학교 보건대학원 의료법윤리학과
1Dept. of Public Health Law and Ethics, Graduate School of Health Science and Management, Yonsei University

ⓒ Copyright 2002 The Korean Society for Medical Ethics. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jun 30, 2002

ABSTRACT

1. When a patient goes to a hospital, he is expected to give consent to the treatment his/her doctor may provide. The initial consent, however, does not include all the consents to the following treatment a patient is going to receive. For further treatments, especially for concrete treatments, the doctor must seek for additional consents.

2. A doctor must offer sufficient informations to his patient when getting a consent. While doing this a pre-written patient informed consent form can be convenient as well as effective. The doctor can explain systematically without leaving out any important point, and the patient can understand much better what the doctor is explaining by reading the paper repeatedly. Furthermore this same form can be useful later on when any legitimate question arise.

3. I reviewed many patient informed consent forms previously made by many academies of medical science in specific medical fields. I find the papers lacking in sufficient informations especially on alternative treatment measures. Even if there are, they are described negatively, which make the forms suspicious of giving biased informations. Above all the terms used are too difficult for the patients to understand. I, therefore, propose a patient informed consent form, which I believe might be ideal.

Keywords: sufficient explanation; consent; informed consent form