From words to action: time for Australia to take shared decision making implementation seriously

Why is embedding shared decision making within the Australian health care system essential and urgent? Shared decision making is a process of engagement and partnership between a patient and their clinician that enables a collaborative decision to be made based on the best evidence, individual circumstances, and what matters most to the patient.1 Patient involvement in making informed health decisions is a fundamental right2 and is central to safe and quality health care. Shared decision making represents the highest standard of informed consent3 and is a cornerstone of value-based health care. As well as benefitting individual patients and clinicians, shared decision making also has an important role in addressing unwarranted variations in health care and has the potential to contribute to health system sustainability by reducing the overuse of low-value care (where the benefits do not, or hardly, outweigh the harms) and increasing the uptake of care that is known to be effective but is underutilised.