Percepción y nivel de comprensión del consentimiento informado en la cirugía del tercer molar inferior

Abstract

The signing of an informed consent by the patient is required before any operation. Objetives: The objectives of this original article were. -To know the level of understanding of the informed consent by the patient. -To determine the percentage of patients who avoid the treatment when knowing the risks of it. Patients and method: 385 patients, who were sudmitted to surgical third molar extraction after signing the informed consent. After that, a survey was carried out to check if they had understood the aim of informed consent as well as their opinion about this procedure. Results: Data were processed with descriptive statistics. The most remarkable thing is that 100% of the patients signed the informed consent and they agreed on the surgery. 99.74% understood clearly what was going to be done during the operation. 97% knew that complications might occur and 94% were aware of their possibility of denying the operation. More than half of them (61.56%) thought that informed consent serves for exempting the professional from responsibility. This kind of information is thought to be useful for 98.96%. Conclusions: The informed consent was understood by the majority of the patients and none of them avoided the operation.