The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends three essential duties of informed consent: disclosing risks/benefits/alternatives to patients and surrogate decision makers, assessing patient and surrogate understanding, and obtaining agreement with treatment. To help training doctors complete all these duties, I created a guide to obtaining informed consent for common pediatric procedures.

This guide was informed by a survey of 48 pediatric residents at my residency program, which found residents did not uniformly disclose probability of success, provide alternatives for procedures, or assess parental/patient understanding. The survey also identified that the majority of residents did not receive or were unsure about receiving any informed consent training. It is my hope that this guide can not only be a resource for trainees, but also for teachers helping students obtain consent for the first time.