Shared decision making

This chapter hopes to stimulate further interest and research from both academic and practitioner health psychologists, including trainees in this increasingly important concept in health care. The chapter begins with a description of shared decision making (SDM), and provides an overview of the key concepts and processes. It chapter concludes with a discussion of areas that have been neglected in the literature on SDM, which in the author's view would be fruitful avenues of research for health psychology. SDM will be seriously compromised without effective methods of presenting probabilistic information on the benefits and risks of diagnostic tests and medical and surgical treatments (often referred to as 'outcome probabilities') that augments interpretation and understanding by patients and clinicians.