Patient Consent

We are a teaching Clinic and so use anonymised patent data for clincal research purposes.

The assumption is that if you come to a research based teaching clinic you sutomatically give consent to the use of your anonymysed data.

Our Ethics committee have recently reviewed this assumption. They are happy for it to continue providing patients are given the option to opt out.

Now in the standard patient details there is a tick box to record that a patient has given consent to be treated. It is blank for all our patients.

So we could co-opt the use of this box. But it is in effect the wrong way round for us requiring a record for those who give consent. Is there a way a setting the record for all existing pateient to “yes”?

Or is there and easy way to reverse this to a non consent?

Or we could bespoke a new bolean field for research consent. This would be set to yes as default and to no when a patient opts out. We would of course need to be able to exclude these opt out patients from research extract reports.

We are not sure which option is easier?

Tony Tayloe
ESO MAidstone