BMJ  2007;334 (23 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.39252.523519.47

Editor's Choice

Editor's choice

Evidence to inform

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The BMJ aims to help doctors make better decisions. Often this may best be achieved by helping doctors to help patients make better decisions. Yet recent research from the Picker Institute has found that doctors in the UK are worse at engaging patients in healthcare decisions than doctors in comparable countries. Use of decision aids is only one aspect of engaging patients but it's a potentially important one. A Cochrane review has found that decision aids improve people's knowledge of the options, create realistic expectations of benefits and harms, reduce difficulty with decision making, and increase participation.

The trial on decision aids for mode of delivery by Alan Montgomery and colleagues (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39217.671019.55) adds to this list of successes and, as Jeremy Lauer and Ana Betran point out in their editorial (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39247.535532.80), it raises intriguing possibilities about how decision aids could be made even more effective. Focussing . . . [Full text of this article]

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