Helping People Make Shared Decisions

Overview

Shared decision making is a process in which patients are encouraged to participate in selecting appropriate treatments or management options. Shared decision making is appropriate in any situation when there is more than one reasonable course of action and no one option is self-evidently best for everyone. This situation is very common since health problems often have many different options, none of which has substantive evidence to support a ‘best choice’. Tools to support shared decision making can include self-management support, access to personal health records, personal health budgets, care planning and decision aids.

More and more people are now asking to know more about their healthcare choices. They want information and the chance to have a say about their care. Shared decision making makes patients an equal partner in their healthcare.

What we’re doing

The Evidence Centre have been commissioned to summarise the evidence on how shared decision making can lead to improvements in the quality of healthcare – defined as safe, effective, patient-centred, timely, efficient and equitable.

The report will be a sister publication to the Health Foundation’s 2011 publication Helping People Help Themselves that looked at self-management and will be of interest to health service managers, policy makers, clinicians and academics.

Why we’re doing it

The White Paper Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS promises that patients will get more choice and control, backed by an information revolution, so that services are more responsive to patients and designed around them rather than patients having to fit around services. The coalition government’s mantra for patient choice and control is "no decisions about me without me".

The research will summarise:

• the evidence on the impact of shared decision making on quality;
• the factors that can increase the effectiveness of shared decision making to improve quality; and
• the evidence on the barriers for embedding shared decision making in healthcare systems.

The report will provide decision makers and clinicians who wish to embed shared decision making into mainstream healthcare with an independent assessment of the evidence on how it can improve quality.      

How we’re doing it

The Evidence Centre will review and synthesise published and unpublished empirical evidence, focusing on the impact of shared decision making on the quality of healthcare and the factors that may help and hinder implementation in practice. The review will include materials from 2000.

The evidence will be collated from searches of bibliographic databases including Medline, EMBASE, CINAHL, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library and Controlled Trials Register, Health Management Information Consortium, National Library for Health, PsychLit, Social Services Abstracts, TRIP, ASSIA, Ovid and ERIC. Additionally, grey literature and unpublished material will be sought.

When will the findings be available?

Spring 2012

For further information please contact:

Darshan Patel, Research and Development Manager