Informing Patients About Their Surgery's Environmental Impact: an Effective Pathway to Sustainable Healthcare?
For patients and families
In plain language
An automatic summary of structured registry data. It is an orientation aid, not a substitute for the official protocol or a physician assessment.
- What is being studied
- The protocol lists: Sustainability added to decision aid.
- Who it may be relevant to
- Registry conditions: Sustainability, Gallstone, Decision Aid, Decision Making ,Shared. Basic parameters: No limits · All.
- What needs checking
- Age, condition and sex are only basic indicators. Prior treatment, laboratory values and other mandatory requirements appear in the eligibility criteria below.
- Where it takes place
- Netherlands
- Next step
- Save the trial, show it to the treating physician, and confirm current recruitment with the study center. Costs, documents and travel →
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Overview
The healthcare sector contributes significantly to climate change. Reducing the number of patients receiving resource-intensive procedures such as surgery can lower carbon emissions, particularly when two treatments with comparable clinical outcomes are available. Nevertheless, the impact of incorporating environmental considerations into patients' decision-making processes remains underexplored. The investigators examine how including information about the environmental impact of treatment options in a gallstone decision aid affects patients' real-life choice between surgery and the more sustainable alternative of conservative treatment. Moreover, the investigators examine whether factors such as severity of symptoms moderate the relation between sustainability information and patients' treatment choice. An exploratory vignette study informed the hypotheses that will be tested among actual patients with gallstones making actual treatment decisions. The results of this ecologically valid study have implications for both clinical practice and healthcare policy by offering insight into the effectiveness of pathways to include patients in the transition towards sustainable healthcare.
Interventions
- Behavioral Sustainability added to decision aid
The intervention decision aid includes a page with information about the environmental impact of surgical removal of the gallbladder, and a control condition, which includes no such information. Besides information about the environmental impact of gallbladder surgery, the intervention and control conditions will be identical. At the end of the decision aid patients will be debriefed in general phrasing (i.e., the aim of this study was to examine which factors affect treatment choice) to prevent
Primary outcome measures
- Treatment preference (surgery or wait-and-see) [Time frame: baseline, pre-intervention]
Secondary outcome measures (2)
- Treatment certainty [Time frame: baseline, pre-intervention]
- Treatment decision [Time frame: Assessment 3 months after the participants receive the decision aid]
Eligibility criteria
Inclusion criteria
- Patients who were referred to three participating hospitals located across the Netherlands
- Patients who received PatientPlus' gallstone decision aid in preparation for their surgical consultation
Exclusion criteria
- None
Criteria are shown verbatim from the registry (in English). Final eligibility is always assessed by the study center.
Healthy volunteers: No
Study design
- Allocation
- Non-randomized
- Model
- Parallel assignment
- Masking
- Triple blind
- Primary purpose
- Treatment
Study locations
Netherlands · 1 center
- University of Amsterdam — Amsterdam
Identifiers
NCT: NCT07505238 · UvA-FMG-12737 · KICH1.MV02.22.017