Content Analysis of Informed Consent Explanations Given by Doctors to Patients and Their Families in Hospital ‘A’

Abstract

The expansion of nurses' work duties is currently being considered. It is therefore anticipated that giving supplementary explanations about pathology and other issues to patients and their families will become one of the principal responsibilities of nurses. To prepare for this likelihood, it is necessary for nurses to fully understand the process of obtaining informed consent undertaken by doctors. This study aimed to take basic information from contexts that were provided by doctors to patients and their fami-lies. The materials used for the analysis were on-site recordings of doctors gaining informed consent from patients and their families in hospital A. Text mining was used to analyze the data. Contents of the explanations were categorized into 9 items according to the criteria used at Hospital A. The results revealed that, as the cases were recorded prior to surgery, words such as "surgery", "anesthesia", and "blood transfusion" were ranked as important keywords and the frequency of these words was also found to be high. Content analysis showed that the doctors' explanations for obtaining informed con-sent mainly concerned pathology and prognosis. The frequency of items relating to patients' concrete requests or questions was found to be low. No explanations were provided concerning the items relat-ing to the procedures for patient withdrawal of consent for examinations or treatments. Overall, medical terminology was found to be used frequently in doctors' explanations. This indicates that patients might have had difficulty understanding these explanations. The results emphasize the need for nurses to have discussions with doctors and to provide any supplementary explanations about pathology and other issues using simpler terms so that patients and their families can fully understand them.