Australia women's prediagnostic decision making styles relating to treatment choices for early breast cancer

Abstract

Women diagnosed with early breast cancer are now asked by their doctors to choose from a range of options their preferred medical treatment plan. Little information is known about women’s treatment decision-making and therefore, nurses do not have evidence to guide this decision support. The aim of this descriptive survey was to investigate the pre-diagnostic decision-making behaviour of a sample (N=377) of Australian women, in regard to their treatment choices for early breast cancer. The data were collected using the Pre-Decision Portfolio Questionnaire (PDPQ) by Pierce (1996) which includes the Michigan Assessment of Decision Styles (MADS). Of 366 participating women, 19.9% strongly agreed to all three items of the MADS factor Deferring Responsibility, 0.3% strongly agreed to all four factors of Avoidance, 32.7% strongly agreed on all four items of Information Seeking, and 63.4% strongly agreed to all five items of Deliberation.Women showed a variety of referred decision styles, depending on age, education, occupation and employment status. Only 36% of women indicated it was critically important to, “get the treatment over as soon as possible”; 55% to “participate in selecting treatment”; and 53% to “read a lot of information”. The understanding of factors that are important to women when they are making decisions for medical treatment, is a mandatory step to design customized evidence based decision support, which can delivered by nurses to help women during this distressing experience..