Bioethics Grand Rounds -Sagar Deshpande, MD

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Wed, February 27, 2019, 12:00pm
Location: 
University Hospital Ford Auditorium

Title: Advancing Informed Consent: Lessons from Political Media Training on Improving Information Retentio. Sagar Deshpande, MD

The typical informed consent process in its current form suffers from several limitations. These limitations include a failure by the patient to understand what they are consenting to, or a transient understanding by the patient which does not persist beyond the encounter.
To gain a better understanding of potential avenues to transcend the limitations of the current informed consent process, we will examine how information transfers are handled in a very different field: political media training. For the political actor, the major metric that they are judged upon is their ability to persuade others. They are furthermore publically held accountable to this ability through elections. Thus, the specific words spoken at a rally, speech, or other encounter are less important than the information and impressions retained by their audience beyond that encounter, and the ability of that retained information to induce them to a specific action (such as voting) at a later point in time.
Media training is the rigorous regimen that politicians and media personalities undergo in order to ensure that they appear personable and ensure their message is as easy to understand and retain for their audience as possible.  This toolkit transcends the content of the spoken word, and includes tone, rhythm, facial expressions, gestures, and posture. We will explore how these techniques can be applied to the clinical encounter in order to aid a patient’s retention of information and thus preserve the integrity of the informed consent process.