Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Shared decision making (SDM) is considered the best approach for making health decisions. In pediatrics, SDM occurs when the healthcare team, parents, and children exchange information and work together as partners to decide the best treatment plan for the child. SDM helps parents and children participate in decision making, feel more confident about the decision that was made, and can improve the child's health. Unfortunately, SDM is rarely used in pediatric clinical settings. The goal of my research is to improve the use of SDM in pediatric clinical practice. To do this, I am developing a SDM program that will include education, training, clinical tools, and expert support for healthcare teams, parents, and children. To ensure the SDM program works, we must test it using advanced research methods. Although very informative, these methods are resource and time intensive. To avoid waste, it is often necessary to 'pilot' the methods using a smaller-scale experiment that will identify and provide an opportunity to fix problems before doing the larger experiment. Therefore, I am proposing to pilot advanced research methods for evaluating how well the SDM program works in pediatric clinical practice. We will ask healthcare teams, parents and children to participate in the study. The results will provide valuable information about recruiting people to our study, collecting data, and whether the program is likely to improve child and parent decision making experiences. We will use this information to run a larger experiment that will provide a definitive answer about whether our program improves the use of shared decision making in pediatric clinical practice.