Computer-based Tutorial as a Means to Enhance the Informed Consent Process for Cataract Surgery

Informing the patient and obtaining the informed consent is one of the major duties physicians perform before beginning a medical treatment. Some years ago we developed the so-called CatInfo programme that allows to inform the patient inter-actively prior to the face-to-face interview with the physician. This program was found to lead to significantly better informed patients in our hospital. Although these findings were significant, we would like to investigate more on two other aspects in this study: Firstly, we would like to learn more about the patients' attitude before and after surgery. Therefore, we would like to ask the patients' about their willingness of being informed and decision making using a standardised questionnaire. Secondly, we would like to investigate on the differences in the duration of informed consent taking in patients that have heard and seen the CatInfo vs. patients received no information prior to the face-to-face interview with the physician. Patients will be randomly assigned to one of these groups. This difference will then be evaluated together with the result of the MCQ (assessing the patients' knowledge concerning cataract surgery after informed consent taking). The primary hypothesis is that patients' are better informed after watching the CatInfo tool although the face-to face interview is shorter.