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Government Perspective, Informed Policy Choice

Governmental perspectives on the individual's right to choice in healthcare and, in particular, the concept of informed choice, are relatively recent. Choice is now seen as being integral to healthcare reforms (patient-led care) taking place in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. These policies contrast with some previous policies in which the government made choices on behalf of the population. Current government policy toward informed choice, in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, is based on the premise that people have an individual responsibility for their own health and are able to make their own choices. The provision of information (particularly evidence-based information) is viewed as being the key to enabling people to make rational choices.

Responsibility for Health

Individual choice in modern health policy in the West has its origins in the intellectual and economic revolutions of the 18th century. Before industrialization, attitudes on health and disease were largely defined by religion. The effect of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution was to replace this with reason. At the same time, the industrial revolution brought with it a new wave of disease and death related to rapid urbanization. Liberal, laissez-faire economic theory initially influenced thinking on health, which as a result was seen as the responsibility of the individual rather than the government. However, investigations and a report by British politician Edwin Chadwick in 1842 linked ill health to water, overcrowding, and other environmental problems. Thereafter the U.K. government took greater responsibility for the health of the population, particularly the sick poor. Public health measures included centralization of the provision of drainage, water, and sanitary regulations. Such centralization was also seen in parts of Europe but took longer to happen in the United States.

Responsibility by the government for the health of the population was to achieve its greatest expression in the United Kingdom with the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1946. By the 1970s, however, the triumph of neoliberal ideology within the leadership of the Conservative Party led to the primacy of ideas of competition, deregulation, and individual choice, ideas that were to continue to influence the new Labour governments from 1997 onward and to become the dominant ideology across the political spectrum. Their application to health meant that users of health services were seen as individualized consumers who (it was assumed) would place a high value on choice and particularly the concept of informed choice.

Informed Choice and Informed Consent

The concept of informed choice is largely based on the principles of informed consent, but there are significant differences between the two concepts. Informed choice usually (although not always) implies the stage before a decision has been made and concerns providing information for people to make rational choices, for example, about the place of care, whether to have health screening, or what type of treatment to have. Informed consent implies that a decision has already been made and concerns the disclosure of the risks involved in, for example, undergoing surgery or an invasive procedure. Both informed choice and informed consent in medical care (and in research), however, have one overarching principle: promoting patient autonomy by providing information on risks and benefits of a healthcare choice, intervention, or treatment.

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