Abstract
Background: Share decision making now is an essential part of every consultation however its acceptance is still debatable. Thus we carried out this survey to record the views of general practitioners regarding the role preferred by patients living with chronic diseases, especially Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension, and Bronchial Asthma, in shared decision-making and assess the perspective about the barriers to shared decision-making.
\Method: This is a qualitative study based on a semi-structured interview of general practitioners. It was conducted in 2010 from January to September during a process of training of general practitioners for consultation and communication skills. The purposive sample of 52-64 general practitioners has been selected from six different urban and rural areas of Saudi Arabia. They all were working under the umbrella of the Ministry of Health and participated in a semi-structured interview.
Results: Only a small number of patients (7%) were classified as preferring roles as an active partner, whereas a collaborative role was opted by only a handful (12.7%) and the majority (78.5%) were happy to become a passive partner. The mostly GPs (81.6%) were annoyed by the little interest of administration in involvement of patients, followed by the complaint of overburden (74.1%). Interestingly, 46.8% mentioned that even patients were not accepting of this idea, to talk about their management as laymen, and 59% pointed out that there is also a problem of awareness. Some doctors (34.1%) also blamed illiteracy.
Conclusion: The results suggested that for the potential to create a cadre of expert patients, people require health professional's positive attitude and also need to rectify the problems mentioned by general practitioners.