Abstract
The ethical and legal requirement to gain informed consent from patients for medical procedures and for biomedical research faces challenges with respect to the transparency problem. The requirement to be transparent by using plain, non-technical language in their Patient Informed Consent Forms (PICFs) is clear but, in practice, hard to achieve. Problems of clear and transparent communication continue to provide a stumbling block to the ethical practice of medicine, law, and biomedical research. Research from the UWA Comic Contracting project indicates that visual/ graphic contracts are significantly better received by users in terms of their comprehension, engagement with the contract, and their perception of the other party. On this basis, we thus suggest that such developments might productively be applied to consent forms in medical and biomedical contexts in order to aid transparency and clarify communication of complicated concepts and language.
Highlights
The ethical and legal requirement to gain informed consent from patients for medical procedures and for biomedical research faces challenges with respect to the transparency problem
In order to fulfil the ethical maxim that we show respect for persons, informed consent practices are supposed to facilitate the complete transfer of information between two parties, e.g. a doctor and patient, or researcher and participant [2]
An epistemic problem arises because some details of medical and biomedical research practices can remain partially or completely opaque even to well informed patients and participantswe might call this potential for ineffective or incomplete transfer of crucial information the transparency problem
Summary
The ethical and legal requirement to gain informed consent from patients for medical procedures and for biomedical research faces challenges with respect to the transparency problem. In the context of the practices of medicine and biomedical research, ‘informed consent’ is required in order to respect the autonomy and dignity of patients and participants [1]. In order to fulfil the ethical maxim that we show respect for persons, informed consent practices are supposed to facilitate the complete transfer of information between two parties, e.g. a doctor and patient, or researcher and participant [2].
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