• Aaron Dahl, Madhumita Sinha, David I Rosenberg, Melissa Tran, and André Valdez.
• From the *Department of Scholarly Projects, University of Arizona College of Medicine; †Department of Pediatrics, Arizona Children's Center; and ‡Department of Research, Maricopa Integrated Health System, Phoenix, AZ.
• Pediatr Emerg Care. 2015 May 1; 31 (5): 339-42.

ObjectiveEffective physician-patient communication is critical to the clinical decision-making process. We studied parental recall of information provided during an informed consent discussion process before performance of emergency medical procedures in a pediatric emergency department of an inner-city hospital with a large bilingual population.MethodsFifty-five parent/child dyads undergoing emergency medical procedures were surveyed prospectively in English/Spanish postprocedure for recall of informed consent information. Exact logistic regression was used to predict the ability to name a risk, benefit, and alternative to the procedure based on a parent's language, education, and acculturation.ResultsAmong English-speaking parents, there tended to be higher proportions that could name a risk, benefit, or alternative. Our regression models showed overall that the parents with more than a high school education tended to have nearly 5 times higher odds of being able to name a risk.ConclusionsA gap in communication may exist between physicians and patients (or parents of patients) during the consent-taking process, and this gap may be impacted by socio-demographic factors such as language and education level.

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