Background:Shared decision making (SDM), a process in which clinicians and patients work together to select treatments based on clinical evidence and the patient’s informed preferences, is the optimal outcome to evaluating evidence-based practice. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) also included SDM as an essential skill of Competencies Interpersonal and Communication Skills for physicians to provide patient-centered care.
Objectives:This study aimed to co-design and co-produce an evidence-based SDM simulation curriculum with clinical teachers, standard patients (SP), and undergraduate medical students to fulfill the needs of students and patients. We also evaluated students’ learning effects quantitatively and qualitatively.
Methods:A mixed methods with firstly performed SP focus group interviews to explore patient needs for SDM, then held 5 consensus meeting by Delphi method with 4 representative students, 3 SP, and 4 teachers to determine core competencies, teaching objectives, course contents, and learning outcomes, finally computed paired t-test to evaluate the progress of students’ SDM skills improvement in objective structured clinical examinations (OSCE) quantitatively, as well as content analyzed the learning effects from students’ interviews and teachers/SP’s focus groups qualitatively.
Results:A total of 122 undergraduate medial students (55% male, mean age 24.2 years old) with mean clinical experience of 10.1 months completed the course and pre-/post-OSCE multi-rater feedback assessments. After training, students’ SDM skills were significantly improved with change scores of 2.8, 9.5, 7.8 among students, SP and teachers respectively. SDM self-efficacy of students and patients, and teachers rated the scores of entrustable professional activities were also significantly improved. The content analysis of students’ interviews, SP and teachers’ focus groups indicated the co-design.co-production SDM curriculum with participants’ feedback could facilitate students’ empathy and weaken medical autonomy mindset, and deepen their attitude, knowledge and behaviors of patient-centered care.
Conclusions:To alleviate medical paternalism and facilitate patient-centered care, clinical teachers, medical students and patients have the right to voice in developing curriculum highly impact and need in the healthcare practice. Our co-designed and co-produced SDM curriculum could be feasible and effective to improve students’ both subjective and objective SDM skills, as well as the SDM self-efficacy quantitatively and qualitatively.