Shared Decision-Making in Mental Health Care - SAMHSA Store ...

27• Promote SDM through professional associations and guilds so that providers,like consumers, can be educated and supported by their peers.• Educate consumers about their rights and support their refusal to sign treatmentplans in which they feel they did not have significant input.• Develop user-friendly, clear, and concise educational materials for State commissionersof mental health and other State policy personnel.• Develop SDM support and tools that address decisions and transitions (e.g.,from jail or hospital to community, from homelessness to care, from treatmentto self-help).Promoting SDM Among Providers• Develop models for and materials about SDM in mental health care that aretargeted to social workers, nurses, case managers, and other mental healthproviders, in addition to psychologists and psychiatrists.• Develop models and materials to support the use of SDM in mental health carein primary care settings.• In educational materials, place SDM in familiar contexts, such as self-managementand decision support.• Emphasize to providers that SDM can help to ensure that a better decision willbe made—more information about the consumer surfaces in the process, andthe consumer is more likely to feel comfortable with the decision.• Advance SDM as an instrument of recovery and the demonstration of a consumer’sability to manage his or her own life interdependently with others.• Promote models of SDM that relieve providers of other responsibilities. Forexample, the CommonGround model provided a history of medication usageand symptoms as well as other feedback about consumer concerns.• Develop a fidelity scale for SDM that providers can use to assess their ownpractices and processes.• Distinguish between a consumer’s difficulty in communicating a decision and alack of capacity to make the decision.Decision Aids: Characteristics• Develop DAs that focus on bilateral communication and collaboration betweenconsumers and providers.• Train peer specialists to support the use of decision aids.Shared Decision-Making in Mental Health Care:Practice, Research, and Future Directions