4 criteria must be met to know if a patient has capacity (taken from Dirty Medicine'sYouTube channel): "ICAL"
I: patient is fully INFORMED about the decision at hand (e.g. doctor tells patient you had a lung infection which worsened and spread to your blood and you become septic then you developed cardiac arrest and we had to perform CPR on you and give you epinephrine to bring yo ass back)
C: patient COMMUNICATES their decision (e.g. explicitly says "I want to be discharged")
A: patient APPRECIATES the nature and severity of the illness (e.g. doctor tells patient you might die if you leave against our medical advice and then the doctor asks the patient to repeat it back to make sure he comprehended that fact)
L: patient can explain their decision in a LOGICAL and linear fashion (e.g. patient says his dad was in an ICU before with many tubes and blood samples being drawn and was on a ventilator and the patient doesn't want to end up like his dad)
NOTE: the patient's "logical" explanation of their decision does NOT have to actually be a good medical decision. As a doctor, you can disagree with their poor medical choice, but as long as the patient came to that decision with capacity intact, then you should respect their decision (autonomy).
I obviously thought that the main thing for capacity is to understand the severity and prognosis of her medical condition BUT I thought this was a trick question because they asked "if the mental examination finding showed..." and the stem failed to mention anything about her orientation to place or time. dumb
Time, place, name → assesses orientation → to see if pt is for example intoxicated or not
Decision making capacity is based off of whether the patient understand her diagnosis and is making an informed consent → she knows and understands
submitted by ∗drdoom(1206)
Stem actually states, “On questioning, the patient does not know the date
[time], the name of the hospital[place], or the name of her nurse who had just introduced himself[person].” So, pt is disoriented to time and place (Choice A); that is definitely concerning -- as would be depressed mood (Choice E) and the other choices -- but “inability to understand severity and prognosis” is the most concerning since that is the very definition of capacity. Inability to understand = lack of capacity.