Role of Informed Consent in Andrological Surgery in Adolescents and Adults

Abstract

Informed consent for andrological surgery, particularly during adolescence, is a delicate and strategic moment in the success of the patient’s therapeutic path. Informed consent must have certain characteristics:

• Clarity and simplicity of exposition to allow easy understanding by anyone who reads it, in addition to the patient, for example, his relatives, lawyers, doctors, and magistrates. The information must also be provided with particular delicacy to adolescent children who sometimes are confronting the hospital environment and surgery for the first time.

• Accompanied by a rich description that allows a better understanding.

• Must contain a part in which the signer declares that he has clearly understood the pathology that is affecting him and a distinct one from the previous part concerning the type of intervention that the patient will undergo, including a description of the relative complications. In this section of the consent form, other surgical procedures contemplated for the pathology in question should also be described.

• The collection of the consent form and a signature should always be by the surgeon before the operator, because, more than in any other surgery, this is a surgery in which the doctor-patient relationship of trust is particularly heard and developed.

• Attendance at the interview with a family member, of the partner if older, or parents if a minor. The signature on the informed consent form results from a clinical diagnostic path divided into multiple periods during which there is a two-way communication between the patient and family practitioner surgeon, especially in the case of a minor patient, to develop a therapeutic alliance that is essential to a successful outcome.