Competency to consent to hospitalization in the medical patient.

A slightly modified version (the CQ-Med) of a 15-item competency questionnaire (the CQ) was used to assess competency to consent to hospitalization in general hospital patients. The purpose of the study was to determine whether voluntary psychiatric inpatients would score comparably with general hospital inpatients using a similar questionnaire. The patients studied performed better in nearly all areas of competency than the previously studied adult and adolescent psychiatric subjects using the same questionnaire (modified for the respective study populations). The CQ-Med questionnaire may be a useful instrument for preliminary screening of general hospital patients, when indicated, for assessment of competency to consent to hospitalization.