The Salzburg Global Seminar Statement on Shared Decision Making

Posted by epatientgr on 28 Μαρτίου, 2011 · 4 Σχόλια

I am proud to announce the publication of The Salzburg Global Seminar Statement on Shared Decision Making in healthcare.

The Statement summarizes the outcome of the second Salzburg Global Seminar «Health and Healthcare Seminar Series II. The Greatest Untapped Resource in Healthcare? Informing and Involving Patients in Decisions about Their Medical Care» of last December, which I was lucky to attend thanks to a fellowship award. The Salzburg Statement is addressed to clinicians, patients, policy makers, researchers, editors, journalists, and others and specifically

«calls on patients and clinicians to work together to be co-producers of health».

It was a rare opportunity for me, as a patient and health activist, to participate in this high-level seminar organised by Salzburg Global Seminar in collaboration with the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making-FIMDM, to listen to the top international Faculty on informed shared decision making in healthcare and to meet, as co-Fellows & as SGS staff, an extraordinary dedicated group of scholars, clinicians, policy makers, health journalists, healthcare managers and patients of course. We met in the unique Schloss Leopoldskron for a week last December to discuss and train on key aspects of informed shared decision making, but also to learn about variations in practice and how these influence the quality of the healthcare we receive, to understand the difference between plain reproduction of health stories coming from news agencies and critical health journalism, to grasp the importance of risk communication in healthcare and how it should be handled in oral, written, printed communication.

The topics we have discussed at the Seminar are the heart of my interests in healthcare and this excellent Seminar has given me a solid theoretical and practical background on these important issues. On the occasion of a local recent conference on Mass Media and Cancer, at which I was a speaker on the infuence of mass media on public perception of disease, I had the opportunity to write already about the importance of clear, trustworthy health news in these three posts in Greek . It took me a while to read all Seminar documentation and additional pertinent research and books, so I will have enough material for a good number of posts throughout the year.

At the end of the Seminar, both Faculty and Fellows decided that it would be worth to formulate in a Statement the outcome of our discussions, experiences, research, knowledge, best practices. The result is the publication last Thursday of The Salzburg Global Seminar Statement on Shared Decision Making, which the British Medical Journal-BMJ featured in a much read press release:

«Clinicians have an ethical imperative to share important decisions with patients, and patients have a right to be equal participants in their care«

On behalf of my Fellows and Faculty at the SGS, I invite you to read carefully the statement and share your views, ideas and experiences on informed shared decision making and to join us in spreading the word around about the importance of patients and clinicians «to work together to be co-producers of health.»