A lot of effort is put on the production of clinical guidelines, however the challenge is with putting them into practice. They are generally developed with health professionals in mind, but patients also need good quality sources of evidence to help them make decisions about their healthcare. It is challenging to write patient versions of guidelines that patients can engage with when making healthcare decisions. The EU funded project DECIDE has developed guidelines in presentation formats designed for the public. Here, we want to test these formats in the citizens' health portal Terveyskirjasto, which is produced by the publishing house of Duodecim, the Finnish Society of Physicians'. The objective of this trial is to compare the DECIDE patient versions to the traditional patient versions of guidelines used in the citizens’ portal.
Users of the Terveyskirjasto health portal.
Participants are randomly allocated into one of two groups. Those in group 1 are given access to the portals current patient guidelines. Those in group 2 are given access to the guidelines developed by DECIDE. All participants in the study record their experience by filling in a short survey.
Patients and public may be willing to make more evidence based decisions concerning health if they are provided with evidence based health information.
This randomised controlled trial will be published as a scientific paper in a journal related to either implementation science or patient information. The results will also be disseminated by DECIDE, the research consortium and EU project to which this study belongs to. The paper will be drafted by the end of 2015 and published hopefully during 2016.