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Consent to treatment is an important part of the delivery of quality cancer care. Physician practices that participate in ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI) and others expressed interest in having ASCO provide informed consent resources, and indicated that they would be more likely to use a consent form for chemotherapy if ASCO provided a template. Recent Journal of Oncology Practice articles outlining unique factors in consent for chemotherapy, documentation issues, and malpractice concerns also raised member interest. In response, members of ASCO’s Ethics and Quality of Care Committees formed a joint working group to design a consent form template and other resources that provide a framework for consent conversations between oncologists and patients receiving chemotherapy.

Physicians confront clinical and ethical dilemmas when their patients wish to continue treatments they have deemed futile; they must consider ethical obligations in deciding whether treatment should be withdrawn and in transferring patients from futile treatment to supportive care.

In the United States, medical errors cause approximately 44,000 to 98,000 unnecessary deaths each year and as many as 1,000,000 excess injuries.1 Disclosure of these errors is a highly charged ethical and legal issue. While physicians correctly perceive an ethical duty to disclose an error to a patient,2,3 deterrent factors like lawsuits and other punitive actions cause a “disclosure gap.” Although most patients want their physicians to disclose harmful medical errors, this happens less than half of the time.4 The bounds of appropriate behavior are even less clear for physicians who discover medical errors made by their colleagues.5 The following vignette and discussion will address the ethical and legal issues faced by physicians who identify a medical error made by a professional colleague, and discuss the factors they must consider in determining when to disclose the error and to whom.