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Canada Research Chair in Shared Decision Making and Knowledge Translation
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France Légaré contributes to an article on Decision coaching for people making healthcare decisions


Decision coaching is non‐directive support delivered by a healthcare provider to help patients prepare to actively participate in making a health decision. Little is known about the effectiveness of decision coaching. 
The authors searched the Cochrane Library (Wiley), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), PsycINFO (Ovid), CINAHL (Ebsco), Nursing and Allied Health Source (ProQuest), and Web of Science from database inception to June 2021. They included randomised controlled trials where the intervention was provided to adults or children preparing to make a treatment or screening healthcare decision for themselves or a family member. Comparisons included usual care or an alternate intervention. There were no language restrictions.
They concluded that decision coaching may improve participants’ knowledge when used with evidence‐based information. Findings do not indicate any significant adverse effects (e.g. decision regret, anxiety) with the use of decision coaching. It is not possible to establish strong conclusions for other outcomes. It is unclear if decision coaching always needs to be paired with evidence‐informed information. Further research is needed to establish the effectiveness of decision coaching for a broader range of outcomes.
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By Carole Thiébaut, 11/11/2021