Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Involving patients in healthcare decisions is crucial for developing and offering treatments that meet their needs and preferences. By understanding what patients value in their healthcare, we can design and implement treatments and policies based on patient's values and provide these inputs into decision-making by policymakers. Healthcare policymakers remain hesitant to apply patient inputs in decision-making given a lack of trust and clarity about patient preference information. In Canada, the information about patient views is currently limited to individual patient's stories or qualitative data about patient's experiences. This results in information from small numbers of patients to be included, lack of consistency in the type of information available and does not give quantitative information about how patients value treatment benefits and risks. However, there is a growing interest in incorporating quantitative patient preferences into decision-making, but it remains unclear how exactly it is used in real-world processes and how much influence it can have on final decisions. Therefore, workshops simulating decision-making deliberations were conducted. These mock sessions included a range of evidence, including quantitative patient preferences, clinical and economic data, to understand how decision-makers might integrate these different forms of evidence into their decisions. The workshops revealed that there is a need for clearer guidelines on how to incorporate patient preferences into decision-making, including how to standardize its content and format. By sharing insights from these workshops, the session aims to provide valuable guidance to stakeholders involved in generating and using patient preferences in decision-making. The session will also offer important takeaways, highlighting the need for balanced, patient-centered decision-making.