Evaluating the quality of informed consent and contemporary clinical practices by medical doctors in South Africa: An empirical study

Table 3 Major challenges to obtaining informed consent by doctors

Challenges	Median score	P-value
Lack of admin. support e.g. interpreters	4	0.013
Time constraints	2	0.226
Work load	3	0.110
Lack of education	4	0.915
Cultural barriers	5	0.551
Language barriers	2	0.453
Medical paternalism (doctor knows best)	7	0.300

Notes: (a) Challenges were ranked from 1-7, with 1 being most difficult and 7 being least difficult, median scores are reported here. (b) Tests of statistical significance across all clinical disciplines were done using Kruskal-Wallis test for independent samples, significance level is P = 0.05

ISSN: 1472-6939