Shared Decision Making
Project Description

Persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) face decisions concerning bladder management that have medical, economic, and social consequences. Reliance on medical advice alone frequently discounts important social and economic concerns that may be more important than the medical ones. Dramatic geographic variation in the approaches used by similar patients points to a dominance of the medical perspective despite unclear evidence supporting any one approach.

The project has developed a compact disk program entitled "U R IN Control " with associated links to web based resources that describes in an interactive multimedia format the medical, social, personal, and economic aspects of bladder management following spinal cord injury. We are presently collecting pilot data on how well this tool enhances knowledge about bladder management and empowers persons with spinal cord injury in the decision making process about their bladder care.