Informed Consent: An Ethical Way of Nursing
As nurses, we deal with informed consent a lot—on admission to a hospital/clinic or before a procedure/surgery. Nurses typically are assigned the task of obtaining and witnessing written consent for healthcare treatment. I’ll never forget admitting to our busy psychiatric unit a young mother who’d been found unresponsive after a drug overdose. She’d been taken to the emergency room to stabilize, and her young child taken into protective custody. Now on the locked psych unit, she was terrified to sign the consent form for admission and treatment, afraid for herself and her child whose whereabouts she did not know. I repeatedly explained what I knew about her child, treatment plan, and consent process, including that she did not have to sign the admission consent. However, if she did not sign, her admitting psychiatrist would request, and be granted, a “court hold” to admit her involuntarily. If she signed as a “voluntary” admission, it would suggest she was cooperating with treatment.