Every three months, consent is revisited, not assumed
Dr Helen Webberley on LBC: trans healthcare, with Tom Swarbrick, LBC
Once a child is given a puberty blocker injection, that decision is locked in. Consent happens once, at the start, and the treatment just continues from there without anyone checking back in.
What I was pointing to there is something people rarely hear: the injections last three months, and every three months the conversation happens again. Consent is not a signature on a form at the beginning and then silence. It is revisited, actively, each time. That is not a loophole or a workaround; it is how good care is supposed to work. And when I think about some of the other medical interventions we carry out on children, ones that cannot be undone, ones where there is no three-monthly check-in, the contrast is striking. Puberty blockers are, in that sense, unusually accountable.
More from this conversation
