Optimising individual and community involvement in health decision-making in general practice consultations and primary care settings: a way forward

The World Health Organisation Alma-Ata Declaration on Primary Healthcare, and the more recent Astana Declaration from the Global Conference on Primary Healthcare, emphasise the involvement of individuals and communities in health decision-making about their individual health care, service delivery and policy development. Increasingly, health funding agencies and academic publishers like the BMJ require Public and Patient Involvement in health research. These imperatives cover health decision-making about different issues in different settings. In this position paper, I argue that individual and community involvement in health decision-making are core to, and useful for, the discipline of general practice but may not be equally familiar or routinised practices in European primary care settings. I use the social science concept of participatory spaces, to describe three overlapping forms of involvement – shared decision-making (SDM) in clinical care, community participation to develop services and Public and Patient Involvement in research. I refer to evidence of implementation challenges for these forms of involvement and provide insights about how to routinise them with reference to the need for these practices to make more sense to general practitioners, for general practitioners to have more time and resources to incorporate them into their daily work and for more research to understand the power dynamics involved. We need leadership in our discipline, and partnership working with policymakers, patient and community organisations, to progress these issues and enable us to optimise benefits for general practitioners, patients and the broader practice population.