Introduction: Health care providers are legally and ethically required to enable informed patient decision-making. Informed consent is a permission obtained before conducting a health care intervention and after informing the person about the procedure, effects and consequences. Purpose: The purpuse of the thesis is to present informed consent, ethical principles, women's rights and patients' rights according to Slovenian legislation. The purpose of the thesis is also to find out whether women are well informed about the interventions, procedures, medicaments in the intrapartum period and whether they are given a possibility to accept or refuse the intervention or procedure. Methods: A descriptive method was used. Literary sources were found with the help of key words in Slovenian: informirano soglasje, obporodno obdobje, kodeks etike za babice, pacientove pravice and English: informed consent, informed decision, intrapartum care. EBSCOhost web portal was used to search foreign and home bibliographic databases Medline, CINAHL, COBIB.SI and others. In the empirical part a quantitative research based on the causal-empirical method was carrid out. A questionnaire was used as a research instrument, made for this particular research basing it on literary sources. To collect and process the data statistically an open source application for online surveys 1KA was used. Results: The research results show women are not completely informed about all the procedures and are not given a possibility to co-decide on all the interventions. The lowest number was achieved in case of manual fundal pressure, anogenital care and vitamin K application with the newborn. The average percentage of women going through procedures in the intrapartum period without being informed about them was 29,0. The possibility of co-decision was the lowest with vaginal examination, episiotomy and manual fundal pressure. The average percentage of women unable to accept or refuse the procedure was 49,0. Discussion and conclusion: Informed consent is not practised enough in the intrapartum period, in spite of being stated by legislation with all the procedures. Due to this negative feelings related to childbirth are intensified and there is a lower rate of trust in the health system. Women expect to be completely informed and actively involved in decision-making, as it is stated in the Slovenian legislation.
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