Speaker: Professor Gordon Guyatt, Distinguished Professor, Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada

When, as is almost always the case, alternative management options have both benefits and harms, patients and their health care providers face a trade-off in which they must place a relative value on those benefits and harms. A key principle of evidence-based medicine that emerges from this realisation is that evidence itself is never sufficient to make a decision; patient values and preferences must always be involved. Clinicians and their patients may differ in their values and preference; those of the patient’s must be paramount. The crucial role of value and preferences mandates shared decision-making in the patient-clinician encounter.

Learning objectives include to understand how values and preferences are involved in any important health care decision, to understand that clinician and patient values and preferences may differ, and how that necessitates shared decision-making and to become aware of decision aids that can help with shared decision-making.

Registration & breakfast at 7.10am, talk begins at 7.40am.