Making Choice Possible: Consent and the Public Health Care System in Canada

About the session: What does patient consent in the medical context entail? To what extent must choices in treatment be outlined and communicated to patients? Based on a decades-long experience with her own battle with breast cancer, Dr. Adrian argues that informed consent demands intelligible resources that enable patients to understand their context and make more informed choices about their treatment trajectory.

About the organization: Be the Choice, an organization Dr. Adrian co-founded and leads, is dedicated to making breast cancer treatment information accessible and participatory. Be the Choice is one example of a tool that shows how highly complex medical information can be made patient-friendly, thereby supporting patient understanding, choice and informed consent.

About our speaker: Melanie Adrian is an associate professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies and holds the inaugural Chair of Teaching Innovation at Carleton University. She is author of Religious Freedom at Risk: The EU, French schools, and Why the Veil was Banned and serves as senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam in North America. Her op-eds have been published in the Globe & Mail and the Ottawa Citizen. Adrian was named to the Order of Ontario in 2019.