Purpose: To explain what patient decision aids are, why they help patients engage more effectively with healthcare, and how their use enables health professionals to meet clinical guidance on delivering shared decision making about treatment choices.

People’s healthcare decisions are emotionally and cognitively demanding, involving trade-offs between treatment options with negative consequences for themselves and their families. Health professionals are delivering increasingly complex care; patients live longer with co-morbidities and increased frailty, and new technologies lead to more treatments being offered. Decision science provides insight into how people make these decisions, and what can influence people’s thinking encouraging them to make more or less reasoned choices.

Patient decision aids are resources developed with reference to decision science evidence on how to structure the health problem, present information about risks, benefits and consequences of options, elicit patient values and guide people to reach treatment choices that fit best in their lives (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001431.pub5/full). This talk provides an overview of the components within patient decision aids (http://ipdas.ohri.ca/who.html) known to support people make more reasoned decisions about their healthcare, using examples taken from patient decision aids developed and evaluated within the UK.

Disclosure of Interest None declared