scholarly journals From sense making to decision making when living with cancer

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-273
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Goering ◽  
Andrea Krause

The diagnosis of a catastrophic illness, such as cancer, brings with it a whirlwind of decisions to be made. As healthcare systems rely increasingly on shared decision making (SDM), understanding how patients make sense of health-related information and equip themselves to participate as equal partners in health-related decision making is essential. Coordinated management of meaning’s (CMM) LUUUTT (lived, unknown, untold, unheard, told stories, telling stories) model provides a useful conceptual and methodological framework for better understanding how stories are woven together to create meaning and influence decision making. This Research Note illustrates the potential of applying the LUUUTT model to autoethnographic vignettes and personal health narratives to reach a deeper understanding of the sense-making and decision-making processes related to living with cancer.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Romero ◽  
Patrick Raue ◽  
Andrew Rasmussen

The shared decision-making (SDM) model is the optimal patient-centered approach to reduce racial and ethnic health disparities in primary care settings. This study examined decision-making preferences and the desire to be knowledgeable of health-related information of a multiheritage group of depressed older Latinx primary care patients. The primary aim was to determine differences in treatment preferences for both general medical conditions and depression and desire to be knowledgeable of health-related information between older Puerto Rican adults compared to older non-Puerto Rican Latinx adults. We also examined whether depression severity moderated those relationships. A sample of 178 older Latinx patients were assessed on measures of decision-making preferences, information-seeking desires, and depression severity. Regression models indicated depression severity moderated the relationship between Latinx heritage and decision-making preferences that relate to general medical decisions, but not depression treatment. Specifically, Puerto Ricans with high levels of depression preferred to be more active in making decisions related to general medical conditions compared to non-Puerto Rican patients who preferred less active involvement. There was no difference between groups at low levels of depression as both groups preferred to be similarly active in the decision-making process. This investigation adds to the literature by indicating between-group differences within a Latinx older adult sample regarding decision-making preferences and the desire to be informed of health-related information. Future research is needed to identify other sociocultural characteristics that contribute to this disparity between Latinx heritage groups in their desires to participate in the decision-making process with their primary care provider.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Mason Pope

The legal doctrine of informed consent has overwhelmingly failed to assure that the medical treatment patients get is the treatment patients want. This Article describes and defends an ongoing shift toward shared decision making processes incorporating the use of certified patient decision aids.


Author(s):  
Kanter van Deurzen ◽  
Imre Horváth ◽  
Regine Vroom

People use cognitive representations in order to characterize, understand, reason and predict the surrounding world. A class of these representations are called mental models. Designers of informing systems are interested in how mental models influence decision making, especially during critical events. With this knowledge they could optimize the content and amount of information that is needed for a dependable decision making process. New insights are needed about the operation of mental models in the course of critical events, as well as on how informing influences the real life operationalization of mental models. Most of the definitions available in the literature are overly general, and no definition was found that would support the design of informing systems for critical events. Therefore, the objective of our research was to derive a definition of mental models that play a role in critical events. Actually, we systematically constructed a definition from those attributes of mental model descriptions that were found to be relevant to critical events. First we decomposed 125 published descriptions to a set of attributes, and then assessed each attribute to see if they were associated with critical events, or not. In fact, this analysis involved not only the relevance of the attributes to critical events, but also the frequency of occurrence in the surveyed papers. This exploration provided a large number of attributes for a new mental model definition. Based on the top rated attributes, a definition was synthesized which, theoretically, has a strong relation to critical events. Though further validation will be needed, we argue that the derived mental model definition is strong because it establishes relationships with all generic features of critical events and makes the related information contents explicit. Hence the proposed definition can be considered a starting platform for investigations of the influence of informing on decision making processes in critical events.


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