What’s really going on here is that you are consenting to this process for your child. But that doesn’t mean that you must do it. You can request a proxy, and that’s exactly what you can do. You can choose someone at the hospital that can be present during the consent process. You can also choose a friend or family member to be present.
Proxy consent isnt a new idea. I used to work in the medical field and I was always told that it was a good idea to get consent for your child from a parent who understands your child. This is the same idea. We are consenting to a medical procedure for our child, and this procedure has implications that we cannot control.
I want to give you a little more background. When I was in medical school we were taught that parents were usually the experts, especially about their children’s health. I did not know that this was not true until I began working with families at a pediatric hospital and I learned that in many cases a parent did not understand the information on an electronic medical record (EHR) that was part of a patient’s record.
EHRs are the electronic versions of paper medical documents that are so easy to access. They are the preferred way to share medical information between providers and patients. As a parent, you want the information you have about your child to be as accurate and complete as possible. This is especially true if the information is shared by a healthcare professional that is not the parent.
Before you have a baby or adopt a baby, you should consider what type of information is most important to the provider you are trying to get your information from. If you’re having trouble deciding, the patient record has an option to “patient proxy consent.” This is a very common setting where a family member or friend of the patient is the one to agree to a specific set of information.
Patient proxy consent is fairly common, but it can be very dangerous. Sometimes a doctor or patient will sign a consent form for their own privacy. This can be a dangerous agreement because the patient must sign the document under duress and is at risk of losing their rights to privacy. This is why I suggest that you consider using a proxy in all medical situations.
The problem with this agreement is that, if the patient is a relative, they can end up being a part of the physician’s decision-making process. So, if a patient is in a situation where their life is in danger and you know that they are, say, the brother of the husband, your physician can make a very selfish decision to consent to your doctor making the life-saving decision for the patient without you knowing about it.
The other problem is that if you don’t know your relative is dying, they can end up having to be on your doctor’s side even if you don’t know they are. So, there’s a chance that they could end up having to sign something with you that they weren’t intended to sign. I wouldn’t want to be the one that my mother signed a legal consent for a surgery, and so she would not have been aware of it when she did.
A proxy is one who serves as a proxy for the patient. In many cases, the patient can consent to the action of a doctor without the patient being aware. Most of the time, proxies are not used with very serious health conditions.
In our experience, proxies are more often used with minor health conditions. This may be due to the fact that the patient is usually more at risk from the procedure, or the fact that it is more difficult to get a signed proxy for a minor condition. If you are wondering what a proxy is, theres a brief explanation here.
