Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of General Nurses, Specialist Nurses, Resident Nurses, and Nursing Students Regarding Informed Consent: A Scoping Review Protocol

Background: Informed consent is an essential ethical and legal process that safeguards patient autonomy, integrity, and rights in healthcare. Although it has traditionally been associated with medical practice, the expanding scope of nursing practice and increased professional autonomy require a clearer understanding of nurses’ roles in this process. Given nurses’ continuous and close contact with patients, examining their knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding informed consent is essential to ensure ethical standards and patient safety. Objectives: This scoping review will map and synthesize the available evidence on the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of general nurses, specialist nurses, resident nurses, and nursing students in relation to informed consent. Methods: This review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and will be guided by the PRISMA-ScR extension. A comprehensive search strategy will be applied to MEDLINE, CINAHL, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cuidatge databases. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies addressing nurses’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding informed consent will be included. Discussion papers, reflective articles, commentaries, letters to the editor, opinion articles, books, book chapters, gray literature, and literature reviews will be excluded. Study selection and data extraction will be performed systematically, and findings will be synthesized descriptively and presented through tables and narrative analysis. Conclusions: This protocol outlines a transparent and reproducible methodology for a scoping review. It will map evidence on nurses’ and nursing students’ knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding informed consent; it will summarize the existing evidence as well. This study was prospectively registered with the Open Science Framework (OSF) on 13 May 2026.