A couple of months ago, the law on medical consent in the UK was fundamentally changed.
Doctors have always decided what patients should know about proposed treatments – what might be gained, what might go wrong, what alternatives there might be. These discussions are sometimes done well, but all too often they are cursory, or partial, or even non-existent. If an aggrieved patient later believes he or she wasn’t given adequate or appropriate information, a court will apply the “Bolam test”. This compares what the doctor in question advised with what a “responsible body of medical practitioners” would have said in the same circumstances. If enough of one’s peers would have behaved similarly, there is no case to answer.
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