Patients' and Healthcare Professionals' Perceived Facilitators and Barriers for Shared Decision-making for Frail and Elderly Patients in Perioperative Care: a Scoping Review

Background: Shared decision-making (SDM) in perioperative care, is an organizational approach to instituting sharing of information and decision-making around surgery. It aims at enabling patient autonomy and patient-centered care. Frail and elderly patients suffering from multiple health conditions and increased surgical vulnerability might particularly benefit from SDM. However, little is known about the facilitators and barriers to implementing SDM in perioperative care for the specific needs of frail and elderly patients. Our objective is twofold: First, we aim at collecting, analyzing, categorizing, and communicating facilitators and barriers. Second, we aim at collecting and mapping conceptual approaches and methods employed in determining and analyzing these facilitators and barriers.

Methods: The search strategy focused on peer-reviewed studies. We employed a taxonomy which is based on the SPIDER framework and added the items general article information, stakeholder, barriers/facilitators, category, subcategory, and setting/contextual information. This taxonomy is based on preceding reviews. The scoping review is reported under the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for Scoping Reviews. Based on the databases MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, and Web of Science, we screened 984 articles, identified, and reviewed 13 original studies.

Results: Within this review, two primary facilitators concerning patients' willingness to participate in SDM emerged: Patients want to be informed on their medical condition and procedures. Patients prefer sharing decisions with healthcare professionals, compared to decision-making solely by patients or decision-making solely by healthcare professionals. Communication issues and asymmetric power relationships between patients and clinical healthcare professionals are barriers to SDM. Regarding the methodological approaches, the evaluation of the conceptual approaches demonstrates that the selected articles lack employing a distinct theoretical framework. Second, the selected studies mainly used surveys and interviews, observational studies, like ethnographic or video-based studies are absent.

Conclusion: Diverging findings perceived by patients or clinical healthcare professionals were identified. These imply that SDM research related to elderly and frail patients should become more encompassing by employing research that incorporates theory-based qualitative analysis, and observational studies of SDM consultations for understanding practices by patients and clinical healthcare professionals. Observational studies are particularly relevant as these were not conducted.

Trial Registration: https://osf.io/8fjnb/.