Continuing professional development for interprofessional teams supporting patients in healthcare decision making

Abstract

Healthcare professionals and organizations, policy makers, and the public are calling for safe and effective care that is centered on patients’ needs, values, and preferences. The goals of interprofessional shared decision making and decision support are to help patients and professionals agree on choices that are effective, health promoting, realistic, and consonant with patients’ and professionals’ values and preferences. This requires collaboration among professionals and with patients and their family caregivers. Continuing professional development is urgently needed to help healthcare professionals acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to create and sustain a culture of collaboration. We describe a model that can be used to design, implement, and evaluate continuing education curricula in interprofessional shared decision making and decision support. This model aligns curricular goals, objectives, educational strategies, and evaluation instruments and strategies with desired learning and organizational outcomes. Educational leaders and researchers can institutionalize such curricula by linking them with quality improvement and patient safety initiatives.

Keywords::

• Decision making
• continuing education
• interprofessional relations
• shared decision making

Acknowledgments

This article is based on a report presented at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice’s 2008 Summer Institute on Informed Patient Choice. Funding for this conference was made possible in part by 1R13HS017378-01 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Funding for this conference was also made possible in part by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making.

Declaration of interest

JK receives funding from the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making for her doctoral research. DL receives funding from the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. BL is Medical Director of the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare. These organizations did not influence the writing of the manuscript nor the decision to publish the article. The remaining authors report no competing interests. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.