Shared Decision Making
Shared Decision Making (SDM) is a central component of Realistic Medicine and supports patients and their families to be involved in decisions about their care.
Shared Decision Making Animation
Watch the animation below for an overview of Shared Decision Making.
Learning Resource - Shared Decision Making
NES in collaboration with Scottish Government have developed an online resource to provide an introduction to Shared Decision Making. This resource is for all staff working in health and social care. The learning resource covers:
- What Shared Decision Making is
- Why Shared Decision Making is important
- What the barriers are to Shared Decision Making
- How to have a Shared Decision Making conversation
The learning will take a maximum of 30 minutes to complete. There is a knowledge check quiz at the end of the resource and we would encourage people to complete this as it will provide the learner with a certificate to evidence their learning.
Learning Resource - How to Measure Shared Decision Making
NES have developed an online toolkit How to Measure Shared Decision Making. This toolkit is for all staff working in health and social care and provides the resources and materials to allow teams, services or organisations to evidence and measure peoples’ experiences of shared decision-making.
The toolkit includes :
- Information for staff
- Information poster
- Patient survey
- Instructions on how to create a patient survey
- Data collection spreadsheet
Please access the toolkit by using the link below:
How to Measure Shared Decision Making
Shared Decision Making eLearning Module
NES has developed an online module, guiding you through what Shared Decision Making is and how you can implement it in practice effectively and immediately. This interactive and reflective module provides practical hints and tips on communication and a how to talk about risks and statistics in ways that are meaningful to people.
Access Shared Decision Making online module.
Please note you must be logged in to your TURAS account to access this.
Links to Helpful Tools and Resources
Having realistic conversations about what matters to a person and options we have available is important for shared decision making discussions and other situations such anticipatory care planning. We can use proven conversation models and language to help us with these discussions.
Health literacy tools and techniques support shared decision making as ‘Health literacy is about people having sufficient knowledge, understanding, confidence and skills to cope with the complex demands of modern health care.’ NES and NHS England developed a module to introduce some useful techniques to aid communication.
Effective Communication for Healthcare (EC4H) is Scotland’s leading NHS communication education programme. EC4H provides workshops supporting staff training in shared decision-making.
Scotland’s House of Care programme is a proven approach that supports and enables people to articulate their own needs and to decide on their own priorities, through a process of joint decision making, goal setting and action planning.
Content updated July 2022