A Patient-centered Continuous and Interdisciplinary Shared Decision Making Approach for Breast Cancer Rehabilitation

Background: Breast cancer rehabilitation has gradually expanded from post-surgery rehabilitation to continuous rehabilitation including prehabilitation between cancer diagnosis and surgical treatment, post-surgery rehabilitation, and return-to-work/return-home interventions. Continuous rehabilitation provides patients with tailored training at each treatment period, in order to maintain patients' functions or accelerate the recovery of functions, reduce the burden of symptoms, and improve patients' independence and quality of life. As the functional rehabilitation needs and lifestyle adjustment needs of each patient's life role are different, only with an interprofessional rehabilitation team, patients can obtain patient-centered and comprehensive rehabilitation interventions. Interprofessional shared decision making (IP-SDM) is an decision-making process that interprofessional team and patients discussion the treatment options, based on the best evidence and patient values and preferences, to make a patient-centered treatment decision. However, the major barriers of the implementation of IP-SDM are the lack of IP-SDM skills of clinicians and the lack of medical knowledge of patients.

Purposes: The project aims (1) to develop a patient-centered continuous and interdisciplinary shared decision making approach for breast cancer rehabilitation, including IP-SDM training for interprofessional rehabilitation team, as well as decision coaching, patient decision aid and question prompt list for patients; and (2) to examine the effects of IP-SDM approach on the IP-SDM self-efficacy of interprofessional rehabilitation team and patients, quality of IP-SDM process, patients' satisfaction with decision, concordance between preferences and the chosen options, patients' upper limb function and health-related quality of life.