Informed consent training improves surgery resident performance in simulated encounters with standardized patients

• Informed consent is a vital part of patient–physician communication, but little formalized training is provided to residents.
• A training program was implemented to improve residents’ ability to conduct and document informed consent with standardized patients.
• Analysis of pre- and post-training indicated that residents’ informed consent discussion and documentation improved.
• Like pretraining, residents’ post-training documented less than they discussed with standardized patients.

BackgroundAlthough informed consent is vital to patient–physician communication, little training is provided to surgical trainees. We hypothesized that highlighting critical aspects of informed consent would improve resident performance.MethodsEighty (out of 88) surgical postgraduate year 1 surgical residents were randomly assigned to one of the 2 cases (laparoscopic cholecystectomy or ventral herniorrhaphy) and instructed to obtain and document informed consent with a standardized patient (SP) followed by a didactic training session. The residents then obtained and documented informed consent with the other case with the other SP. SPs graded encounters (“Checklist”); trained raters graded notes. Repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to determine differences between pre- and post-training and Checklist versus “Note” scores.ResultsStatistically significant pre- to post differences for Note (P < .01) and Checklist (P < .01) along with significant differences between Note and Checklist (P < .01) were noted.ConclusionsTraining improved surgery residents’ ability to discuss and document informed consent. Despite this improvement, significant differences between discussion and documentation persisted. Documentation training is a future area for improvement.