Abstract

The Patients’ Rights and Duties Act, promulgated in Chile in 2012, has made the informed consent process a critical step to respect the patient’s autonomy. It is then relevant to test health workers’ knowledge of the subject, especially in the surgery department. We carried out a quantitative study on 90 specialists from the surgery department in a public tertiary hospital, to whom a questionnaire was administered to test their knowledge of informed consent. We found that 76.6 % of the respondents have a low level of knowledge, creating a setting in which patients’ rights can be violated.