Grant: Project Grant

It is important to get a patient's permission (consent) to enroll them in research studies. However, stroke can happen so suddenly that patients are sometimes too sick to give their own consent. In this situation, researchers try to collect consent from family members or legal representatives on behalf of the patient. In some cases, researchers may enroll patients without their permission. We are trying to develop a way to get a patient's consent before they become too sick to provide it for themselves because we believe that patients should always be as involved as possible in the decision-making process. This new way is called advance consent and we are trying to see if patients who are at risk of having a stroke would agree to participate in a research study ahead of time in case they came back to the hospital in a situation where they were too sick to give consent. If we show that this program can work, we will expand our research to share our findings with stroke researchers around the world, and we hope that clinical trials will adopt this method to increase patients' involvement in stroke research. So far, we have asked doctors, ethicists and patients about what they think about advance consent. We are now ready to test our model of advance consent with stroke patients.