Decision making by patients: An application of naturalistic decision making theory to cervical screening and chronic renal failure, Working Paper 2006/5
Over their lifetime, individuals typically make many decisions about health and health care. Theoretical approaches to decision making have been dominated by a rational, analytic approach which assumes that problems are relatively fixed and well-defined and which have foreseeable and measurable endpoints. Naturalistic decision making (NDM) approaches attempt to mimic ìreal worldî situations where problems vary, may be defined differently by individuals with diverse perspectives and where endpoints are uncertain and complicated. In-depth interviews were conducted with 40 individuals living in the community: twenty participants had chronic renal failure and twenty were women in the target age range for cervical cancer screening. Decision making processes used by these two groups of health care consumers correspond well with the concepts of NDM. In particular, Image Theory provides a framework within which the process of decision making by health care consumers can be described, including the issues which influence what decisions are made. The findings also demonstrate the usefulness of studying decision making in ìreal worldî situations and in using less analytic techniques than traditional normative approaches in evaluating health care decision making. The results suggest that NDM is deserving of a wider audience in health care. Health care providers who use NDM models to understand their patientsí decision making processes may improve their capacity to involve patients in decision making.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by CHERE, University of Technology, Sydney in its series Working Papers with number
2006/5.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? You can import bibliographic info in various formats into you bibliographic tool, or just into your word processor. See under "publisher info" on each abstract page.