Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

There is a growing number of people who are living with chronic conditions (e.g. diabetes, heart disease) and their health depends on good self-management. Self-management is having the knowledge, skills, and support needed so the person with the chronic condition can slow or stop it from getting worse. To do self-management well, health care providers (e.g. doctors, nurses, dietitians) need to work with patients so everyone shares their knowledge (e.g. patient shares they prefer walking over a gym, doctor shares exercise recommendations) to create a personalized self-management plan (e.g. walk 3 times a week after dinner for 30 minutes). Self-management plans need to adapt to life changes and this requires an ongoing partnership between health care providers and patients. "Shared decision making" is a way to create this partnership, but is currently rarely done. My work aims to increase shared decision making in primary care with the following plan of action: (1) Create a theatre play using research, patient stories, and advice from patients and health care providers; (2) Perform the play to show common problems to shared decision making and allow the audience to see different perspectives (e.g. patients see what the doctor is thinking, doctors see how life context impacts self-management). The audience will then work together with actors and myself to identify changes and tools needed to increase shared decision making; (3) Create a course with interested audience members that combines the play with activities to train health care providers based on work in (2), and (4) test the course with health care providers to get their feedback on areas to improve and to test if the course does what it is expected to do (e.g. change attitudes towards shared decision making). This work is important because the research will use theatre in an original way that gives us a new method to meaningfully include patients and families in the design of the care they receive.