Shared decision making in Swedish community mental health services – an evaluation of three self-reporting instruments

Abstract

Background: Despite the potential impact of shared decision making on users satisfaction with care and quality in health care decisions, there is a lack of knowledge and skills regarding how to work with shared decision making among health care providers.

Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of three instruments that measure varied dimensions of shared decision making, based on self-reports by clients, in a Swedish community mental health context.

Method: The study sample consisted of 121 clients with experience of community mental health care, and involved in a wide range of decisions regarding both social support and treatment. The questionnaires were examined for face and content validity, internal consistency, test-retest reliability and construct validity.

Results: The instruments displayed good face and content validity, satisfactory internal consistency and a moderate to good level of stability in test-retest reliability with fair to moderate construct correlations, in a sample of clients with serious mental illness and experience of community mental health services in Sweden.

Conclusions: The questionnaires are considered to be relevant to the decision making process, user-friendly and appropriate in a Swedish community mental health care context. They functioned well in settings where non-medical decisions, regarding social and support services, are the primary focus. The use of instruments that measure various dimensions of the self-reported experience of clients, can be a key factor in developing knowledge of how best to implement shared decision making in mental health services.

• Recovery
• mental illness
• questionnaire
• shared decision making
• reliability
• validity

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the participants for taking part in the study.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper. The study was supported by grants from The National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) in Sweden.