Patient-centred care and shared decision making in Chile: Rising momentum for progress and implementation in clinical practice

Abstract

The Chilean legislation establishes that patients have rights and responsibilities in regards to their healthcare. This is an important statement as it declares that people must be informed and become actively involved in their care; meanwhile, the health system needs to coordinate the provision of personalised and effective services. Although patient-centred care (PCC) and shared decision making (SDM) are relatively new concepts in Chile, the country is experiencing an interesting political momentum to create more interventions to achieve PCC and SDM and explore clinical implementation. Currently, research efforts in Chile have focused on better understanding the state of the art related to both concepts and how new clinical approaches could help to operationalize them.

Keywords: Chile; partizipative Entscheidungsfindung; patient-centred care; patientenzentrierte Versorgung; shared decision making (SDM).