[Informed consent with special emphasis on Croatia].

Respecting the informed consent and its implementation is one of the fundamental components of high-quality health care. This article discusses the informed consent with an overview of Croatian and international legal documents and scientific studies dealing with this issue. Based on the review of the literature it can be concluded that this is an important issue that contains several key components that should be observed and investigated. It is necessary to evaluate the purposefulness and quality of the implementation of the informed consent, to systematically examine respect of the patients' right to information regarding the medical procedure during treatment, to explore decision-making model in the physician-patient encounter in Croatian hospitals, to determine the content and amount of information shared between physicians and patients, to determine the content and readability of consent forms and written patient information on the medical procedure. In order to assure higher quality of the implementation of the informed consent it is necessary to define by law a list of medical procedures that require written consent and to uniform consent forms for the same medical procedures country-wide.