INFORMATION
The informed consent
Antonio Ferreira Couto Filho
Lawyer and President of the Biorights Commission of the Brazilian Lawyers Institute
On the behalf of the patients right's protection to moral and physical integrity, as a constitutional rule, it is understandable the increasing inflexibility to meet with the informed consent requirements. The Law and The Code of Medical Ethics define the theme by ratifying the need of both previous information and Consent. However, the express consent form is not required. However, in view of the Consumers' Code of Rights, mainly in the application of the burden of proof inversion, one must not leave off this express consent under pain of not being able to prove the patient has been informed and consented.
There is not a mandatory pattern to render this king of information. On the other hand, there is not a rule or a strict form to collect the Consent. When at multiple procedure hospitals the physicians may not have permission to obtain the informed consent, once they are subjected to strict administrative guidelines regardless if the job is public or private.
We have considered how to yield a minimum strict adherence to orders or rules that would be enough to prove you have informed the patient and got a straight answer from the patient. The answer always drives us towards the written consent. The patient should be fully informed by means of plain and current language and terms; technical terms should be avoided. However, one cannot require a comprehensive and complex study about the disease and its outcomes.
The fear is that at this point of the judgement, in a real case, the nation-wide judges use foreign criteria as far as the inflexibility to meet with the requirements of information content and the proof of the consent is concerned. Thus, ruling out the unpaired considerations as for the typical and unique form of the Brazilian Health to exist, where the working conditions are hard to the physicians, besides the multitude of patients to be taken care of and the low cultural level of the most part of the population, surpassing the expectancy regarding medical practice and the power the physicians hold.
With the speed up of the global information and the velocity of its invalidation, we can confound the judges towards an understanding that the physicians are the personification of knowledge, and that they can impose everything as an obligation. The judges must understand that the Brazilian physician's capacity of action is limited to the difficult delivery of social work.
What outlines and limits the physician duties is his/hers protection to the human being dignity, which is warranted by the Constitution.
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
23 Sept 2008 -
Date of issue
June 2008
