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Should Participants Ability To Give Informed Consent

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Reference Through interviews conducted by the Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation of participants with “extensive knowledge of and experience with informed consent in the United States,” the author claims that reform is needed in the informed consent process when conducting clinical trials, specifically within informed consent documents and their comprehension. Informed consent documents should be modified because they currently hinder participants’ ability to give informed consent. Although they are attempting to fully outline all the information a patient needs to know to be informed, when these documents consist of pages and pages of complex language, participants often cannot comprehend the content, or choose to simply skip to the end to sign instead of attempting to read through the whole document, and these outcomes are counterintuitive to the purpose of informed consent documents. There are regulations that require a certain amount of information to be given …show more content…

Comprehension can be affected not only by the actual explanation of the procedure, but also by the setting that it is presented in as well as the time allotted for patients to process the information given to them before they are expected to make a decision. Information is useless if it isn’t understood, so it is important for those running clinical trials to be sure that their participants actually understand what they are being told. Some of the interviewees “proposed that research participants should be tested to demonstrate a certain level of comprehension about the clinical investigation” (Lorell, 2015, p. 694). It is not enough to simply supply the information; researchers need to ensure that all of the information is properly

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