Patients are often repeatedly woken when being repositioned during that 24-hour period. This repositioning regime is often, if not always, carried out without informed consent.

One rare complication of eye surgery is sympathetic ophthalmia, where an operation performed on one eye can cause loss of vision in the other eye. The estimated chance of this occurring because of eye surgery was cited in the High Court case as about 1 in 14,000 cases. The key issue to informed consent is whether the patient, if informed of this 1 in 14,000 risks of sympathetic ophthalmia with the chance of losing the eye opposite the eye being operated upon, would have refused the surgery as being too risky in her case' (Mazur, 2013).

LINKS

Mazur, D. J (2013). Informed Consent in the Twenty-First Century: What It Is, What It Isn't, and Future Challenges in Informed Consent and Shared Decision Making. Sociology Compass, 7(9), 762-774. doi:10.1111/soc4.12067

Doc Malik interviewing Anna de Buisserat