Primary health care professionals’ views on barriers and facilitators to the implementation of the Ottawa Decision Support Framework in practice

Abstract 

Objective

To describe primary health care professionals’ views on barriers and facilitators for implementing the Ottawa Decision Support Framework (ODSF) in their practice.

Methods

Thirteen focus groups with 118 primary health care professionals were performed. A taxonomy of barriers and facilitators to implementing clinical practice guidelines was used to content-analyse the following sources: reports from each workshop, field notes from the principal investigator and written materials collected from the participants.

Results

Applicability of the ODSF to the practice population, process outcome expectation, asking patients about their preferred role in decision making, perception that the ODSF was modifiable, time issues, familiarity with the ODSF and its practicability were the most frequently identified both as barriers as well as facilitators. Forgetting about the ODSF, interpretation of evidence, challenge to autonomy and total lack of agreement with using the ODSF in general were identified only as barriers. Asking about values, health professional's outcome expectation, compatibility with the patient-centered approach or the evidence-based approach, ease of understanding and implementation, and ease of communicating the ODSF were identified only as facilitators.

Conclusion

These results provide insight on the type of interventions that could be developed in order to implement the ODSF in academic primary care practice.

Practice implications

Interventions to implement the ODSF in primary care practice will need to address a broad range of factors at the levels of the health professionals, the patients and the health care system.

Keywords: Decision support, Shared decision making, Implementation, Physicians’ attitude, Barriers and facilitators assessment