Clarify the language on this "Consent" page - confusing/illogical for clinicians

[pacharanero]

I think we need to review this entire section carefully, possibly with Adele the DPO of RCPCH, and the E12 Team including clinicians representatives.

The issues are

1) The E12 Audit has a legal basis for obtaining this data that does not require consent at all, therefore asking for consent FROM THE COMPLETING CLINICIAN is highly confusing in my opinion.

2) "I consent to the inclusion of Bob Dylan's data in Epilepsy12." A clinician cannot give "consent" on behalf of a patient, so this is meaningless.

3) "I understand that I may withdraw my consent at any time." I wonder if at some stage this was intended to be part of some future 'patient facing' platform then we should remove it as it is going to confuse users.

4) Question options are not logically consistent: "I do not consent" is not the negative of "I confirm all criteria are present" really.

Stuff that's OK

"I confirm that the information relating to Bob Dylan is accurate." seems OK and reasonable to ask clinicians to confirm. I suggest leave this in.

Suggestions

• We should be clear that this is to be filled in by E12 clinicians, and avoid confusiong language that suggests patients are involved in pushing these buttons.
• If the patient has expressed a wish to not be part of E12 then "Patient/guardian has declined consent to be in the Epilepsy12 Audit" would be an acceptable form of words for the right sided button, and should trigger the same effect internally in the E12 app (patient record is deleted)
• We could reasonably ask a clinician to record that "they are not aware of any objection to inclusion from patient guardian", this could be in the bulleted list.
• Remove "I understand that I may withdraw my consent at any time."
• The left sided button should then read as currently: "I confirm all criteria are present"

I would appreciate views/thoughts/alternative snippets of text @AmaniKrayemRCPCH @coldunk @eatyourpeas @nikyraja

[eatyourpeas]

The consent page is only viewable to superusers It is meant for patients when the time comes.

[pacharanero]

OK, well, speaking as a superuser and one of the lead developers I was unaware that I was seeing something only Superusers can see. Is there no way this could be hidden completely and brought back when (IF?) we do end up adding patient level access?

[eatyourpeas]

This was discussed and there are screenshots on the dev signal group Yes it can be removed but better to say that at the time rather than here.

[nikyraja]

Thanks both. I would be happy for this element to be hidden for all users including superusers for now.

When we are ready to introduce the patient/family facing element, we can revisit and finalise the language used.

[anchit-chandran]

@eatyourpeas to confirm, is this related to any form scoring functionality? Can it be simply removed without affecting any functions? If so, me/ @dc2007git can remove

[eatyourpeas]

Thanks @anchit-chandran no it is not scored in the forms to my memory But if possible I would rather the template references be commented out rather than removed. It was a feature request at the start and I put it in to keep the models tidy so we would not have to add this stuff later. As such there is code related to this feature in the views and the URLs as well as the models.

[pacharanero]

If you feel strongly about leaving the code there, commented out, then fine, leave it, however this does neam that newcomers to our codebase will find commented out sections of code to be confusing.

In general, commenting out unused code is considered an antipattern (described variously as 'litter' 'dead code' and 'lava flow' antipatterns in the literature). I googled this both ways and could only find articles saying NOT to do it. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3664288/is-it-bad-practice-to-leave-commented-out-code-in-production-releases .

Using Git we can easily revert to any previous version of the code, so we can always get back any previously committed code, when the time comes to reimplement the feature.

[eatyourpeas]

By all means do remove all the code. It will involve:

1. removing the template partial (consent.html) within the form and reference of the template partials in the steps.html
2. removing the post call back endpoint in the view
3. remove the field from the model
4. update the form calculations where the consent field is referenced that it not be counted in the form score

[nikyraja]

Happy to follow your lead, however just to flag that introducing a CYP facing element, where this consent feature will be used, is still on the long-term roadmap for the project.

[pacharanero]

Discussed in E12 SPM today and downgraded from highest prioirity because it's less urgent than other work at the moment.