Wouter Leclercq

Challenging the knowledge base and skillset for providing surgical consent by orthopedic and plastic surgeons in the Netherlands: An identified area of improvement in patient safety 69 4 The strength of this study is the high response rate from many departments over the country and the opportunity to compare these results with our earlier study in the GS group. Some differences between the OS and PS groups are found, but on the majority of the questions, results are in concordance with this previous study. 9 There are, however, also limitations to this study. SIC is not a very popular topic in the surgical field, and we had trouble getting respondents. The low individual response rate reflects this matter, and selection bias is therefore possible. But if present, this study is likely to provide too optimistic of a view of reality as the results of the respondents were not good, and they might even be lower in the rest of the population who did not respond. Many respondents asked for more training and better SOPs, forms and tools, and hopefully this article will help to improve awareness on this topic and enhance the quality of the SIC process in the future.