Scenarios in Medical Ethics-5: Informed Consent Process

Informed consent process is becoming more challenging these days with researchers involved in collecting data during complex situations like an emergency or an epidemic. Other concerns are about translating into local language of informed consent documents prepared in English and consent for reuse of stored samples to obtain additional information, to name a few. To address some of these issues, a 1-h panel discussion session on “Informed consent process” was held during the 2-day workshop organized for Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) members on September16–17, 2019, at Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Puducherry, in association with Indian Council of Medical Research Bioethics unit, Bangalore. We planned each session to have a lecture followed by case discussions. Each session included a series of 3–6 scenarios followed by 1–3 questions. After presenting each scenario, the participants were invited to give their comments. After a thorough discussion, a set of panelists, who were experts in biomedical ethics, were invited to discuss the scenario and provide more informed and authoritative opinions. The discussions were quite lively, and we believe that the case scenarios should be of wider interest. Four similar panel discussion sessions on other topics have already been published in earlier issues of this journal. In this article, we discuss the session on “Informed consent process.” The answers provided by the participants are listed first followed by the expert opinion by the panelists.