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Background There is little knowledge as to whether the chronicity of a disease affects patientsÕ desire for participation.

Decision aids in North American breast cancer outpatients have been shown to assist with treatment decision making and reduce decisional conflict. To date, appropriate delivery formats to effectively increase patient participation in newly diagnosed breast cancer inpatients have not been investigated in the context of German health care provision. The impact of a decision aid intervention was studied in patients (n ¼ 111) with a strong suspicion of breast cancer in a randomised controlled trial. The primary outcome variable was decisional conflict. Participants were followed up 1 week post-intervention with a retention rate of 92%. Analyses revealed that the intervention group felt better informed (Z p 2 ¼ 0.06) but did not experience an overall reduction in decisional conflict as compared with the control group. The intervention had no effect on uptake rates of treatment options, length of consultation with the surgeon, time point of treatment decision making, perceived involvement in decision making, neither decision related nor general patient satisfaction. Patients who received the decision aid intervention experienced a small benefit with regards to how informed they felt about advantages and disadvantages of relevant treatment options. Results are discussed in terms of contextual factors and individual differences as moderators of treatment decision aid effectiveness.

The study results provide novel evidence on the role of individual differences and the mechanisms behind decision aid effectiveness, and demonstrate the long-term impact of decision aid interventions on some indices of well-being.

This qualitative study examines doctor-patient interactions and interviews with breast cancer patients referring to shared decision making. The interviews have been evaluated according to the method of grounded theory. Videos of doctor-patient interactions show information and discussions on therapy planning. Breast cancer is a serious, in many cases life-threatening disease. The primary therapy is characterised by confrontation with the diagnosis, fear and hope of the patients and the subsequent treatment. Central themes of the article are the context and implicit assumptions of doctors influencing the shared decision making approach.

The German Ministry for Health and Social Security is funding ten projects to introduce shared decision making into clinical practice. The medical problems the projects are focussing on were chosen from among various diseases (e. g. depression, multiple sclerosis, cancer). The ten projects achieved consensus on a core set of instruments for the measurement of process and outcome of the shared decision making. Instruments developed in German-speaking countries are currently not available. Thus, linguistic and cultural validation had to be performed for the core set instruments. The results of the data analysis as well as patient interviews demonstrate the need for improving these instruments. Therefore, the members of the methodological working group concentrated on the integration of these results in a new instrument. In a first step the construct of "shared decision making" was defined, followed by a definition of the process elements characterising shared decision making. Thereafter, items were developed on the basis of the process elements. The new instrument will now be validated for different diseases.

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