Practice of the principle of right conduct in obtaining informed consents and legibility of the consent forms - a clinical audit

Background Informed consent forms must be clear and include all the necessary information of the possible risks, benefits and complications of the procedure needing consent to. Thus, the form should not include illegible handwriting, medical jargons and abbreviations. Ethically, it should be obtained by a higher ranked physician [1]. In a thirteenweek audit conducted in a Dublin hospital, we observed the effects of revised informed consent forms by quantifying the number of errors, if any, created through this process and propose an immediate solution to it.