Lara Dubois
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Should my child go on Ritalin? Which of the options offered by my doctor to treat my cancer should I choose? Should I move my family across the country to take a new job?
Every day, countless people are faced with making major decisions in their lives. “I hated making tough decisions,” says Dr. Annette O’Connor, “especially without the right information and the right tools to weigh the positive and negative consequences.”
Motivated by her own frustrations, O’Connor, recipient of the University of Ottawa’s 2005 Researcher of the Year award, has devoted her research to making the decision-making process a little bit easier for people.
O’Connor is a professor at the School of Nursing in the Faculty of Health Sciences as well as a senior scientist in clinical epidemiology at the Ottawa Health Research Institute. She has spent over 20 years researching how people make important decisions and subsequently, in developing tools to help people improve their decision-making. She also has worked to create tools to help health care workers guide people in deliberating over important decisions.
“By creating tools that help people to fully understand the options they have, and to prioritize which benefits and harms matter most to them, they are better prepared to make major decisions with their health practitioner,” says O’Connor. “Patients need the latest information and practitioners need to know what matters most to informed patients.”
Decision aids present the facts about options, outcomes and probabilities. Some aids are self-directed and others are administered by health professionals who coach patients through a decision-making process.
A recent large project involved the Arthritis Society, a consumer group, and international researchers who summarized the evidence on options for 15 common muscle and joint problems ranging from arthritis to tennis elbow. Over 15 decision aids were created in six months.
As part of another project at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, every woman diagnosed with breast cancer sees a video decision aid on lumpectomy versus mastectomy and answers questions on a touch screen. The responses are summarized for the surgeon including the woman’s preferred role in decision-making, her understanding of options, and the outcomes that matter most to her. This information then serves as the basis for future doctor-patient consultations.
Although most of the work done by Professor O’Connor focuses on health care decisions, the tools can often be used when facing other big life decisions, such as how many children to have or what career to pursue.
O’Connor’s new challenge is wide scale implementation. She leads an international network that is developing a global inventory of decision aids, along with standards, training programs, and rapid-response methods to keep pace with changing information and options.
The University of Ottawa, the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO), and the University of Ottawa Alumni Association sponsor the University of Ottawa Award for Excellence in Research. The award recognizes contributions to research that bring distinction for the researcher and the University.
