Shared Decision Making, the Health Foundation’s new programme, is seeking a multi-disciplinary design team to explore how shared decision making can best be implemented into clinical practice.
Not being properly told about their illness and the options for treatment is the most common cause of patient dissatisfaction. Most patients want more information and a greater say in decisions about their care.
Shared decision making is a process in which patients are encouraged to participate in selecting appropriate treatments or management options. In shared decision making patients are involved as active partners with the clinician in clarifying acceptable medical options and choosing a preferred course of clinical care.
Jo Bibby, the Health Foundation’s Director of Improvement Programmes said ‘The core aim of this programme is to demonstrate how shared decision-making can become a core characteristic of mainstream health services, both within primary and secondary care services, at large-scale; and in particular, to build knowledge about how this can be achieved and what the conditions for success are.’
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’. In these situations, shared decision making is about helping patients understand the potential outcomes of each choice. These are known as ‘preference-sensitive’ decisions. In these cases, the patient’s attitude to the likely benefits and risks should be a key factor in the decision.
SDM relies on two sources of expertise:
- The health professional is an expert on the effectiveness, probable benefits and potential harms of treatment options
- The patient is an expert on herself, her social circumstances, attitudes to illness and risk, values and preferences.