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Background.

Shared decision-making is an imperative in chronic pain care. However, we know little about the decision-making process, especially in primary care where most chronic pain care is provided. We sought to understand decisional needs of people living with chronic pain in Canada.

Methods.

Informed by the Checklist for Reporting Of Survey Studies, we conducted a population-based cross-sectional online survey of random samples of adults living in Canada with chronic noncancer pain and registered with the Leger Marketing panel. We used a stratified proportional random sampling based on the population and chronic pain prevalence of each province to achieve representativeness. Based on the Ottawa Decision Support Framework, we collected data on difficult decisions faced when interacting with health care providers, the level of decisional conflict associated with the most difficult decisions (ie, Decisional Conflict Scale), the assumed and preferred role during the decision-making process (ie, Control Preferences Scale), and respondents’ characteristics. We used descriptive quantitative analyses of survey responses.

Results.

Of the 31,545 invited panellists, 2,666 met the eligibility criteria, and 1,649 respondents from the 10 Canadian provinces completed the survey. Respondents had diverse socio-demographic profiles. Mean age was 51.84 years (SD= 16.33). Half were man (51.36%), most lived in urban areas (87.75%), pain duration ranged from 3 months to 59 years and respondents reported an average number of painful body regions of 2.30 (SD= 1.52). We observed that 96.73% of respondents faced at least one difficult …