Grant: Prize: IHSPR Rising Star Award

Shared decision making (SDM) is considered the best approach for making health decisions. In pediatrics, SDM helps parents and children to participate in decision making and can improve the child's health. Unfortunately, SDM is rarely used in pediatrics. The goal of my research is to improve health decision making for children and parents by using proven strategies to move SDM research into practice and policy. This knowledge translation initiative focuses on a SDM program that helps children and parents making difficult decisions within a large children's hospital. The SDM program involves education and training for healthcare providers, patient decision aids (i.e., tools that provide families with medical information and help guide them through the SDM process), and decision coaching (i.e., a trained healthcare provider that coaches families through the SDM process). Before creating the SDM program, we summarized the research evidence, conducted studies to find out what made it easy and hard to use SDM, adapted proven SDM tools for children and families making health decisions, and provided SDM training and education to 186 healthcare providers. Then, we evaluated the impact of the program with children and parents making health decisions. Findings showed that youth and parents were satisfied with SDM and that it improved their decision making outcomes. For the next steps, we will improve our SDM program based on healthcare provider, parent, and child feedback and test it in a larger study.