Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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The benefits for shared decision-making (SDM) in delivery of high-quality and personalized care are undisputed, but what is it about the dynamics of the delivery room that leads some to doubt that true SDM is possible? How difficult can it be to establish SDM as the norm when caring for a woman in labour? The discussion around SDM, autonomy, and rationality is timely and highly relevant to wider practice. ⋯ The recent UN report advocating a human rights-based approach to end mistreatment and violence against women in reproductive health services has a particular focus on childbirth and obstetric violence. This paper contributes to the recognition of obstetric violence as a human rights violation. It offers conceptual tools to diagnose the impact of gender stereotypes during childbirth and to eliminate women's discrimination in the field of reproductive health.
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Today, in the age of big data, we are more capable than ever before. But even having the world at our disposal with naught but the touch of a button, we find ourselves exceedingly vulnerable in the patient chair. With insurmountable amounts of knowledge being published and disseminated around the world, how can clinicians keep up and what can be done about it? And sitting in the patient chair, bewildered by the ever-changing landscape of medicine at the blink of an eye, how can we, as patients, ever hope to be part of the conversations revolving around our own health? In this work, we explore the present-day problems of big data in the clinical context, how failing to integrate patients can result in detrimental outcomes, and what shared decision making can do about it.
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Mental health and general health care research has shown that practitioners can facilitate patient involvement in shared decision making (SDM) and that the approach can benefit patients who wish to take part in decisions around their care. Yet patient experiences of SDM within a psychotherapy context have been little researched. This study examined how clients experienced SDM in a collaborative-integrative psychotherapy. ⋯ The six categories were (a) experiencing decisions as shared, (b) psychotherapists supporting clients to become more active in the decision-making process, (c) both parties presenting and recognizing expert knowledge, (d) clients felt recognized as an individual and accommodated for by their psychotherapist, (e) clients felt comfortable engaging with the decision-making process, and (f) daunting for clients to be asked to take part in decision discussions. A core category emerged of "Psychotherapists encourage client participation and progressively support clients to provide information and contributions towards shared treatment decisions that could be led equally, or marginally more by one party." Such support was particularly useful when clients had difficulty contributing as part of decision discussions. Client preferences for SDM change across clients and across decisions, highlighting the importance of practitioners remaining flexible to individual clients when using the approach.
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The aim of this study was to employ knowledge user perspectives to develop recommendations that facilitate implementation of a complex, shared decision-making (SDM)-based intervention in an interprofessional setting. This study was part of a larger knowledge translation (KT) study in which interprofessional teams from five freestanding, academically affiliated, rehabilitation hospitals were tasked with implementing a cognitive strategy-based intervention approach that incorporates SDM known as Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) to treat survivors of stroke. At the end of the 4-month CO-OP KT implementation support period, 10 clinicians, two from each site, volunteered as CO-OP site champions. ⋯ The recommendations reflected all four iPARHIS constructs: Facilitation, Context, Innovation, and Recipients. Implementation recommendations, from the knowledge user perspective, highlight that context-specific facilitation is key to integrating a novel, complex intervention into interprofessional practice. Facilitators should lay out a framework for training, communication and implementation that is structured but still provides flexibility for iterative learning and active problem-solving within the relevant practice context.
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The foundationalist and anti-foundationalist conceptions of medical knowledge have been at loggerheads for decades. Evidence-based medicine (EBM), the most prominent form of foundationalism, has attained wide appeal and acceptance among authorities. It proposes that evidence is the "base" upon which all clinical decisions should be grounded. ⋯ In this paper, I provide a survey of the foundationalist and anti-foundationalist debate in medicine and defend anti-foundationalism on the basis that foundationalist approaches are anachronistic, and in the case of evidence-based medicine ultimately confuses inputs (evidence) for consideration in making a judgement with outputs (conclusions). I further propose that virtue ethics is inseparable from anti-foundationalism and conclude that the current infatuation with EBM implies something rather troubling; that physicians cannot be trusted to utilize their extensive training and skills to make reasonable decisions in the best interests of their patients. If this is in fact true, it suggests a crisis in virtue amongst medical professionals.