A review of the ways in which healthcare professionals can be helped to involve their patients in the healthcare decision making process

A review of the ways in which healthcare professionals can be helped to involve their patients in the healthcare decision making process



A review of the ways in which healthcare professionals can be helped to involve their patients in the healthcare decision making process Updated


Légaré F, Stacey D, Turcotte S, Cossi M, Kryworuchko J, Graham ID, Lyddiatt A, Politi MC, Thomson R, Elwyn G, Donner-Banzhoff N
Published Online:
15 September 2014


When there are several treatments possible, healthcare professionals can involve patients in the process of making decisions about their care so that the patients can choose care that meets their needs and reflects what is important to them. We call this 'shared decision making'. Although the results are better when patients are involved, healthcare professionals often do not involve their patients in these decisions. We wanted to know more about what can be done to encourage healthcare professionals to share decision making with their patients. In our review we identified 39 studies that tested what activities work in helping healthcare professionals involve their patients more in the decision-making process. We learned that any such activity was better than none, and that activities for healthcare professionals and patients together worked somewhat better than activities just for patients or just for healthcare professionals. However, given the small number of studies and the differences across the studies, it was difficult to know which activities worked best. This review suggested ways to better evaluate how much healthcare professionals involve patients in healthcare decisions so that we can understand this process better in the future.

- See more at: http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD006732/EPOC_a-review-of-the-ways-in-which-healthcare-professionals-can-be-helped-to-involve-their-patients-in-the-healthcare-decision-making-process#sthash.cA1YtawR.dpuf