Dr Louise Austin1
1Cardiff Unversity, Cardiff, United Kingdom
Despite the United Kingdom’s (UK) move towards a patient-centred standard of disclosure in informed consent to treatment, the disclosure of alternative treatments continues to be dominated by medical perspectives. To avoid a return to the reasonable doctor standard as the threshold for disclosure, the scope and limits of medical perspectives in informed consent need to be clarified.
The standard of disclosure in informed consent to medical treatment has long been a source of discussion and debate in healthcare law. For several decades, the UK adopted a reasonable doctor standard of disclosure but in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board (2015) the UK’s Supreme Court rejected the reasonable doctor standard in favour of a combined reasonable/particular patient standard, as adopted by the Australian High Court in Rogers v Whittaker (1992). In Hii Chi Kok (2017), however, the Singaporean Court of Appeal noted that despite the Supreme Court’s rejection of the reasonable doctor standard in favour of a patient-centred approach, medical perspectives would continue to play a role in determining questions of disclosure.
An analysis of UK cases dealing with disclosure of reasonable alternative treatments post-Montgomery confirms that not only do medical perspectives continue to play a role in determining questions of disclosure, but such perspectives dominate these questions. To avoid the reasonable doctor standard being reasserted as the standard of disclosure, therefore, this presentation seeks to outline the scope and limits of medical perspectives in questions of disclosure of alternative treatments.
Biography:
I joined Cardiff Law School as a lecturer in 2019. My research looks at the interaction between medical ethics, medical professional regulation, and medical law, with a focus on informed consent. I completed my PhD at the University of Bristol. Before that, I was a clinical negligence solicitor.