EBM NOTEBOOK
A simple paper-based patient decision aid
Bloomfield Medical Centre; Blackpool, UK
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Illustrating risk and benefit to help patients make decisions about treatment (or no treatment) remains a challenge to health professionals. Many people have difficulty understanding numbers. This is compounded by the use of different denominators (eg, 1 in 50 v 3 in 100) that often occurs when professionals relay statistics from research. But good communication of numerical information is important. Rare events can be perceived as more likely than they really are, whereas more common outcomes are dismissed as unlikely. The lack of context for many probabilities also impairs judgment, and all of this ignores the other perceptual factors at play, such as proximity.
Visual presentations can be powerful ways of communicating risk information. The 100-faces model has been used in several scenarios: a grid of 100 faces (figure) is set up to show the proportions at risk of a particular outcome, be it an event or harm, with the
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