JABFM Revises Patient Consent Policy
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* Anne Victoria Neale
* Marjorie A. Bowman
* Phillip Lupo

To maintain the highest privacy standards for patients, all case reports submitted to the *Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine* (*JABFM*) for review should include a signed consent form by every patient mentioned in the manuscript. We will not send clinical patient case reports or case series out for review until the consent form(s) have been received.

Our new patient consent form is now on our website ([www.jabfm.org](http://www.jabfm.org)), underneath the information for authors page, and reproduced in Figure 1. The completed form can be uploaded as a supplement in Rapid Review, scanned and emailed to jabfm@med.wayne.edu or faxed to (313) 577-9828.

We adapted the patient consent form required by the *BMJ* in developing this form, and some of the language in the *JABFM* form is similar to that in the *BMJ* form.1

![Figure 1.](http://www.jabfm.org/https://www.jabfm.org/content/jabfp/21/6/485/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure 1.](http://www.jabfm.org/content/21/6/485/F1)

Figure 1. 
**Form for Patient Consent to the Use of Personal Health Information in Manuscripts Submitted for Publication.**

## Notes

*   *Conflict of interest:* The authors are editors and staff of the *JABFM*.

## Reference

1.  Patient consent form. BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. c2008. Available from [http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/authors/checklists-forms/patient-consent-form](http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/authors/checklists-forms/patient-consent-form). Accessed 11 September 2008.