Supporting Canadians making emergent health decisions to focus on what matters most to them: establishing, testing, and scaling patient-oriented interventions

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians are facing newly arising tough health decisions. Research shows that when people are supported in making decisions, they have better outcomes. In the last decade, our research team has surveyed patients to tell us about their decision-making needs and created and tested decision support tools as ways to help people make decisions that reflect what matters to them. Yet, little is known about newly arising decisions since the pandemic. We used a rapid process to create 2 decision aids in 2 weeks for people thinking about removing a loved one from a nursing or retirement home during the pandemic (downloaded >10,000 in 3 weeks in April 2020). Yet there is a wide gap in knowing which decision support tools need to be created quickly to meet Canadian's pressing needs in making informed decisions that match what matters to them. We propose to identify emergent decisions Canadians are facing and create a series of field-tested decision support tools to address their decision-making needs. We plan to conduct three surveys of Canadians every 6 months to identify emergent decisions they are facing. We will find, adapt, create, and test decision support tools based on their decisional needs. We will use rapid reviews to follow changing evidence and use a secured collaborative writing platform to allow for new evidence to be added into decision support tools in real time. Then study their use by providing them online and linking them into the electronic medical record. We will provide results for best strategies and create evidence-based decision support tools for empowering Canadians and supporting the important work of clinicians within health systems. Our study also fits Canadians' priorities for making informed decisions that match what matters most to them so their values prevail.