Patients today are more empowered and knowledgeable than they have ever been. By law, they must be told about the risks and benefits of proposed treatments and give informed consent before treatment is initiated. Through the democratization of medical information, they have access to peer-reviewed medical journals. Social media allows patients to share stories with others and to learn about other people's experiences with various treatments. There are websites written by experts at leading medical schools to help patients understand diseases and treatments. They have the right to see their medical records. The net result of all changes is a shift in the power balance between doctors and patients. Ideally, as a result of these shifts, the patients' values and preferences should guide treatment decisions. However, this proliferation of information often leads to confusion rather than clarity. Publicly available information often includes seemingly contradictory conclusions and recommendations. Patients don't know which opinions to trust. So, although patients have more information than ever, and many want to make decisions for themselves, they need more guidance than ever to help them process an avalanche of information. This volume aims to help both medical professionals and their patients navigate the evolving healthcare landscape by analyzing the process of shared decision-making (SDM) in clinical medicine. The concept of SDM has emerged in the last two decades as a middle ground between, on the one hand, old-fashinioned physician paternalism of the "doctor-knows-best" variety and, on the other hand, unfettered patient autonomy by which patients are thought capable of individually and independently choosing their own medical interventions. Advocates of SDM imagine that decisions will be made best if they follow a complex discussion and negotiation between doctor and patient; such discussions should incorporate the doctor's medical and technical expertise as well as the patient's goals, values, and preferences. SDM takes different forms for different patients in different clinical circumstances. This volume gathers experts in SDM to share their insights about how it ought to be done. The authors include clinicians, social scientist, and philosophers, all of whom have thought about or cared for patients from a variety of backgrounds and in a variety of clinical circumstances. The papers explore the complexity of SDM and offer practical guidance, gained from years of experience, about how to employ SDM as effectively as possible.

"There are some paradoxes in the way doctors and patients make medical decisions today. Today's patients are more empowered than were patients in the past. They have the right to see their medical records. The law requires doctors to obtain their informed consent for treatment. Patients are told about the options for treatment and the risks and benefits of each option. Their values and preferences are elucidated in order to guide the treatments that are provided"--

The idea of person-centred health systems is widely advocated in political and policy declarations to better address health system challenges. A person-centred approach is advocated on political, ethical and instrumental grounds and believed to benefit service users, health professionals and the health system more broadly. However, there is continuing debate about the strategies that are available and effective to promote and implement 'person-centred' approaches. This book brings together the world's leading experts in the field to present the evidence base and analyse current challenges and issues. It examines 'person-centredness' from the different roles people take in health systems, as individual service users, care managers, taxpayers or active citizens. The evidence presented will not only provide invaluable policy advice to practitioners and policymakers working on the design and implementation of person-centred health systems but will also be an excellent resource for academics and graduate students researching health systems in Europe. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Winner of the 2021 PROSE Award for CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY and PSYCHIATRY Against a global backdrop of problematic adherence to medical treatment, this volume addresses and provides practical solutions to the simple question: "Why don't patients take treatments that could save their lives?" The Wiley handbook of Healthcare Treatment Engagement offers a guide to the theory, research and clinical practice of promoting patient engagement in healthcare treatment at individual, organizational and systems levels. The concept of treatment engagement, as explained within the text, promotes a broader view than the related concept of treatment adherence. Treatment engagement encompasses more readily the lifestyle factors which may impact healthcare outcomes as much as medication-taking, as well as practical, economic and cultural factors which may determine access to treatment. Over a span of 32 chapters, an international panel of expert authors address this far-reaching and fascinating field, describing a broad range of evidence-based approaches which stand to improve clinical services and treatment outcomes, as well as the experience of users of healthcare service and practitioners alike. This comprehensive volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to offer an understanding of the factors governing our healthcare systems and the motivations and behaviors of patients, clinicians and organizations. Presented in a user-friendly format for quick reference, the text first supports the reader’s understanding by exploring background topics such as the considerable impact of sub-optimal treatment adherence on healthcare outcomes, before describing practical clinical approaches to promote engagement in treatment, including chapters referring to specific patient populations. The text recognizes the support which may be required throughout the depth of each healthcare organization to promote patient engagement, and in the final section of the book, describes approaches to inform the development of healthcare services with which patients will be more likely to seek to engage. This important book: Provides a comprehensive summary of practical approaches developed across a wide range of clinical settings, integrating research findings and clinical literature from a variety of disciplines Introduces and compliments existing approaches to improve communication in healthcare settings and promote patient choice in planning treatment Presents a range of proven clinical solutions that will appeal to those seeking to improve outcomes on a budget Written for health professionals from all disciplines of clinical practice, as well as service planners and policy makers, The Wiley Handbook of Healthcare Treatment Engagement is a comprehensive guide for individual practitioners and organizations alike. 2021 PROSE Biological and Life Sciences Category for Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

This volume offers a theoretical and practical overview of the ethics of pediatric medicine. It serves as a fundamental handbook and resource for pediatricians, nurses, residents in training, graduate students, and practitioners of ethics and healthcare policy. Written by a team of leading experts, Pediatric Bioethics addresses those difficult ethical questions concerning the clinical and academic practice of pediatrics, including an approach to recognizing boundaries when confronted with issues such as end of life care, life-sustaining treatment, extreme prematurity, pharmacotherapy, and research. Thorny topics such as what constitutes best interests, personhood, or distributive justice and public health concerns such as immunization and newborn genetic screening are also addressed.

​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.