The feasibility of investigating decision making about emergency surgery

Healthcare professionals often perform emergency surgery, even though it’s expensive and can cause poor health or even death.

Shared decision making is when patients and health professionals make decisions together about what treatment the patient will have. The purpose of shared decision making is to support individuals to make decisions about their care that are right for them.

Shared decision making is particularly important for patients having surgery because, unlike many medical treatments, the effects of surgery are immediate and irreversible. This means patients can’t stop treatment even if the benefits aren’t what they hoped for, or the side effects become unacceptable.

We’ve done a lot of research on shared decision making, but very little research has been done on shared decision-making in emergency care.

Project aims

The aim of this project is to find out if it’s feasible to investigate decision making about treatment in emergency care. We will use what we find out to design a larger study of shared decision making in emergency care.

We plan to:

• Find out when, in the course of a patient’s care, decisions are made about emergency surgery
• Record these conversations between healthcare professionals, patients, and their families
• Find out healthcare professionals’, patients’ and families’ views on recording these conversations, and ways this can be done sensitively

What we hope to achieve

Our goal in this project is to gather information on how best to research shared decision making in emergency care, to design a future research project.

We hope that, eventually, this research could help patients and their families be more involved in decisions about emergency treatment they receive.