Ethics education for patients to ensure consent is informed

Abstract

Ethics education is a substantial function of ethics consultation. However, the current focus is largely on education for healthcare professionals rather than for patients and their families. Informed consent, as the basic application of the principle of respect for autonomy/persons, requires patients to have a complete understanding of their medical conditions, treatment options, and available alternatives. Nevertheless, without meeting the ethical aspects of the therapeutic relationship, providing patients with relevant medical information cannot make consent informed. Besides the pertinent medical information, patients should know how to incorporate ethical standards into their care, how to reflect their values and preferences in their medical decisions, and how to make autonomous choices. In this view, patients’ literacy in ethics should be considered an essential component of informed consent. Therefore, this paper sheds light on ethics education for patients and recommends healthcare institutions provide patients with education on key ethical subjects through ethics consultation services. Although current challenges of ethics consultation cause a major limitation to achieve this, the significant increase in the number of ethicists/bioethicists can allow healthcare organizations to improve their capacity, capability, and quality by employing more well-educated ethics consultants. For this reason, the availability of leadership and financial support may alleviate the problems and give an opportunity to ethics consultation services to extend ethics education to patients and their families. Not only can ethics education for patients ensure that consent is informed, but it can also notably benefit patients, healthcare professionals, and healthcare organizations.