1229 Standardising Consent for General Surgical Patients

Aim Informed consent requires all material risks to be discussed, as per Montgomery vs Lanarkshire 2015. This audit was based on the latest RCS England guidelines on consenting patients. We aimed to assess our adherence and to introduce standardised procedure-specific consent stickers to ensure the highest standards of care, which were reproducible. Method We undertook two retrospective case note reviews of patients undergoing emergency and elective general surgery procedures from 01/01-15/06 and 01/10-30/11 in 2020. RCS Good Surgical Practice 3.5.1 “Consent” details the standards for this audit. We included patients undergoing appendicectomy, cholecystectomy, incision and drainage and hernia repair (inguinal, umbilical, and incisional). We did not audit laparotomy due to variability in procedural risks precluding a specific sticker and we excluded patients unable to give consent. Results Our initial audit of 82 patients highlighted the variability between practitioners in the material risk discussion. Different patients undergoing the same procedures were being consented differently with significant omissions. We designed procedure specific-consent stickers to be used when consenting to address this imbalance and made these stickers available on surgical wards. A re-audit of 50 patients showed increase from 41% to 88% in documentation of material risks. While only 34% of the audited consent forms featured the stickers, those forms that did have the stickers on had 100% material risk documentation. Conclusions We saw an improvement in material risk discussion by implementing procedure-specific consent stickers. This supports the growing need for standardising consent across General Surgery to reduce variability. We will next aim to design laparotomy stickers.