Dialogues in Shared Decision Making is a course for GPs created by the Health Education England working across West Midlands in partnership with GPs, GP trainers and trainees, patients and others.The aim of the course is to enable both trainee and established GPs to improve their skills in involving patients in decisions made about their care.

Shared decisions between doctors and patients about their treatment improve both patient satisfaction and medical outcomes.

They are often cheaper too as some patients opt for self-management and thus require fewer consultations.

But for shared decision-making to work, GPs need good consulting skills, which is what this course is about.

Shared Decision Making focuses on consultations between a patient and a GP on 12 different concerns, such as missed periods, a tingling arm, headaches and an unexpected pregnancy.

The consultations, which are based on real patient encounters, are films showing both good encounters and ones in which the GP does not succeed in sharing the decision-making with the patient.

There is then a further film in which the patient says how they found the consultation and a document which raises some of the arising issues.

As part of a national initiative, our team was awarded a £35,000 grant to develop a shared decision learning tool.

Martin Wilkinson, Director of Postgraduate GP Education for the West Midlands Deanery, said: “Most shared decision-making projects elsewhere have concentrated on shared decisions for hospital treatment, but we thought it was important to focus on where most patients interact with the NHS - which is primary care - and develop a tool to help teach GP registrars, their trainers and established GPs.”

This course requires an enrolment key which you can get from Sukvinder Kaur, Senior Project Manager, NHS Midlands and East at Sukvinder.Kaur@wm.hee.nhs.uk

Dialogues in Shared Decision Making was re-launched on Health Education England (HEE) e-Learning for Health (e-LfH) in May 2016