We explored factors that influence doctors' decision making in this situation and sought to gain an understanding of the barriers and facilitators to the application of best practice.
Whether an action could be considered "appropriate" for this group of patients was a major part of doctors' decision making strategies.
Although the discretization of individual risk scores into a finite (and often small) set of risk groups may introduce bias (Gerds and Schumacher, 2001), this approach is very intuitive and conforms to the daily doctors' decision making process, e.g. the attribution of either low or high risk to patients.
An indirect consequence of prolonged waiting times is that they de facto increase the disease severity threshold for referral decisions i.e., capacity constraints influence doctor-decision making.
In the first stage we focussed on doctors' decision-making processes using a think aloud method.
Four participants made comments endorsing trust in their doctors when reviewing a question about the influence of trust in doctors in decision making.
A few large health systems, including Kaiser Permanente and the nation of Australia, have adopted this curator-docent approach, which has been shown to improve doctors' clinical decision making.
In April 2010, he assisted in training three mobile diabetes teams who visited 30 health centers on the island and completed diabetes evaluations on approximately 1,800 patients, including point-of-care testing to aid the doctors in decision making.
We also specifically assessed who reported shared rather than independent (either doctor or patient) decision making.
The social factors underpinning the interaction between nurses, residents' families and doctors also influence decision making around antibiotic prescribing.
