Psychiatric Malpractice
Medical Malpractice & Informed Consent
"Informed Consent as a Dynamic Process"
"The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that a patient's withdrawal of consent to a vaginal delivery during labor constitutes a change in circumstances, thereby obligating her physician to have another informed consent discussion (Schreiber v. Physicians Insurance Company of Wisconsin,, Wis., No. 96-3676, 1/26/99). In addition, the court ruled that the physician should have given the woman the option of having a cesarean section.
The court declined 'to view the informed consent discussion as a solitary and blanketing event...a point on a timeline after which such discussions are no longer needed because they are 'covered' by some articulable occurrence in the past.' Previous informed consent rulings in Wisconsin have dealt only with the adequacy of initial informed consent discussions between a doctor and a patient-not on the withdrawal of informed consent that was considered valid when obtained." [The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer 1999:159-160.]