Patient involvement and shared decision making (SDM) in treatment
is increasingly on the health care agenda both nationally and
internationally. Studies have shown that the benefits of actively including
patients in decisions about their health care improves their
health, satisfaction and agency, as well as being more cost-efficient
(SUM 2014,2). SDM has been shown helpful in the primary sector
in lowering the use of antibiotics (Legare et al 2012), where growing
resistance due to antibiotic overuse is a public health problem, with
primary care responsible for 90% of the prescriptions in Denmark.
Using Conversation Analysis on a dataset of 13 cases this study investigates
how treatment decisions for antibiotics are made in primary
care and whether the interaction follows the ideal of SDM. It
finds that most treatment recommendations are presented as decisions
already made, not encouraging the patient to participate in
the decision making.