The Campbell Academy Blog (208)

The lie of informed consent (for Dentists)

I was checking over someone’s example of a consent form the other day (for one reason or another) and it struck me that this is a complete lie designed to grind us down and into submission and remove our attention away from things that are more important.

We all know (those of us that work in health care) that written consent is not worth the paper that it is written on and it will protect you very little when the patient says they didn’t understand.

It’s why handing out refunds to patients has become the norm, rather than the exception when anyone raises their voice.

(This is a toxic situation now, which means we have no protection but to give money back and allow our businesses to suffer)

Constructing the incredible consent letter (which we have done, time and time again and even resulted in the production of our now famed patient information booklet) is there little or no protection should the s**t hit the fan.

Younger Dentists don’t understand this very clearly and so they hit the ground running and come to you with their consent letters and say look how good this is. What they don’t see is the damage that it does to patients and the patients that it scares off from having treatment, which might be entirely reasonable but at a very low risk.

Back to the defensive culture again but in protecting ourselves (wrongly) and thinking that we are then covered from every eventuality (wrongly) what we succeed in doing is discouraging a percentage of the population from having a healthcare intervention, which may improve the quality of their life.

A difficult circle to square ay?