Establishing patient decision aids in primary care: update on the knowledge base.

In recent years, many industrialised countries have moved forward initiatives to reinforce their primary healthcare sector. At the same time, there has been an increased emphasis on the engagement of patients as partners in their care. Consequently, the process by which patients are engaged to share their preferences and become involved in healthcare decisions is changing and pushing the needs for a new kind of knowledge tools, namely patients decision aids. We argue that for shared decision making to be adopted in primary care practices, patient decision aids will need to be embedded in routine clinical care. Subsequently, the objectives of this paper are twofold: to briefly review the knowledge base regarding the implementation of shared decision making in clinical practice and to identify the gaps in knowledge that will need to be addressed for the effective implementation of shared decision making in clinical practice to occur.