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Asking Questions, Not Just Giving Information: Shared Decision Making is Relational

Tuesday, September 30, 2014
by Gonzalo Bacigalupe, EdD, MPH @bacigalupe
& Geri Lynn Baumblatt, MA @GeriLynn Gonzalo Bacigalupe is Professor of the Master of Science in Family Therapy Program and the PhD in Counseling Psychology, College of Education & Human Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is President of the American Family Therapy Academy. Bacigalupe is co-principal investigator of a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Pilot research project: Influence and evidence: Understanding consumer choices in preventive care.

Because the benefits of cancer screening and its usefulness for a wide group of patients are uncertain and the harms may outweigh the potential benefits, doctors and patients need to engage in shared decision making (SDM). And while this sounds straightforward, it’s often challenging.

We’ve both been involved in developing SDM tools to guide breast and prostate cancer screening, Gonzalo with a focus on Latino patients.

Most SDM research is based on the idea that patients make individual decisions. So the focus has been on understanding how patients acquire and make sense of information that’s often packed with statistical, epidemiological, and probabilistic data. And we ask how well people comprehend it.

Missing from this equation is how many people operate not just as individuals but also as one person within a net of family and community relationships. Most Latino patients talk through these decisions not just with their close relatives, but also with their extended family and other significant members of their network. Decisions about prevention, diagnosis, and treatment are not just in the working of their individual minds or a cognitive process, but located in the ecology of relationships.

For vulnerable patients, besides having more difficulties at making sense of complex data, the question of how we explore their approach to decision making is central and requires cultural humility.

So what can clinicians do?
Ask about patients' social and cultural context and be curious about how they make sense of healthcare decisions. These questions are an example of how we may capture the rich context and story that may play a pivotal role in how the patient participates in the decision making process.

I know this is a lot of information, if you were to discuss this with a family member or friend, what would be the outcome of the conversation?

What other information do you need to help you make a decision you feel comfortable with?

How would these options affect you and your family’s day-to-day life and their ideas about you?

The epidemiological or probabilistic data, no matter how attentive is to the literacy level of a specific community, will be meaningless if we do not understand who and what plays a significant role in complex healthcare decisions.

Tags: communication, shared decision making, family caregiver

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Asking Questions, Not Just Giving Information: Shared Decision Making is Relational

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