Informed consent

One of the main lines of argument for publishing surgeon performance information appeals directly to the doctrine of informed consent. It is a commonplace in medical ethics that a significant medical procedure cannot ordinarily be conducted on a patient without that patient's consent. It is also widely accepted that consent cannot be effectively provided unless it is grounded on a proper basis of relevant information. Hence the phrase ‘informed consent’. It has become standard in medical practice, and indeed in medical law, to hold that medical professionals have a responsibility to ensure that patients have given their effective informed consent, before a significant medical procedure can be conducted.

The first chapter in this section, by Steve Clarke and Justin Oakley, argues that standard treatments of the doctrine of informed consent, such as that due to Faden and Beauchamp (1986), have implicitly been committed to the provision of surgeons' performance information to prospective patients before a surgical operation can take place. Standard treatments of the doctrine of informed consent concur on the requirement that all significant risks involved in undergoing an operation must be disclosed to a patient before that operation can take place. The significant risks of an operation will vary, inter alia, according to the performance abilities of the surgeon undertaking the operation. Clarke and Oakley argue that, because standard treatments of the doctrine of informed consent require that the actual risks of an operation be disclosed, this doctrine implicitly requires that the performance abilities of prospective surgeons who may be conducting the operation in question be disclosed.