The Potential of Medical Consent Contracts Using Visuals

The ethical and legal requirement to gain informed consent from patients for medical procedures and for biomedical research faces challenges with respect to the transparency problem. The requirement to be transparent by using plain, non-technical language in their Patient InformedConsent Forms (PICFs) is clear but, in practice, hard to achieve. Problems of clear and transparent communication continue to provide a stumbling block to the ethical practice of medicine, law, and biomedical research. Research from the UWA Comic Contracting project indicates that visual/graphic contracts are significantly better received by users in terms of their comprehension, engagement with the contract, and their perception of the other party. On this basis, we thus suggest that such developments might productively be applied to consent forms in medical and biomedical contexts in order to aid transparency and clarify the communication of complicated concepts and language.