Temporal characteristics of decisions in hospital encounters: a threshold for shared decision making? A qualitative study.

Objective: To identify and characterize physicians' statements that contained evidence of clinically relevant decisions in encounters with patients in different hospital settings.

Methods: Qualitative analysis of 50 videotaped encounters from wards, the emergency room (ER) and outpatient clinics in a department of internal medicine at a Norwegian university hospital.

Results: Clinical decisions could be grouped in a temporal order: decisions which had already been made, and were brought into the encounter by the physician (preformed decisions), decisions made in the present (here-and-now decisions), and decisions prescribing future actions given a certain course of events (conditional decisions). Preformed decisions were a hallmark in the ward and conditional decisions a main feature of ER encounters.

Conclusions: Clinical decisions related to a patient-physician encounter spanned a time frame exceeding the duration of the encounter. While a distribution of decisions over time and space fosters sharing and dilution of responsibility between providers, it makes the decision making process hard to access for patients. Conclusions: In order to plan when and how to involve patients in decisions, physicians need increased awareness of when clinical decisions are made, who usually makes them, and who should make them.