How can we help lay people avoid overdiagnosis and choose high value medical care? Open to various projects

*** Background *** Some diagnostic tests and screening are overused and cause overdiagnosis. This can lead to avoidable patient harms and healthcare costs, reduce healthcare sustainability and have other negative impacts. There are growing global efforts to identify strategies to reduce inappropriate testing and screening. These need to be implemented at all levels, from policy to funding models to interventions targeting doctors and - importantly - lay people like patients and the general public. Few lay people are aware about the risks of excessive testing, screening and overdiagnosis. Furthermore, traditional fact-focused strategies have had limited effect on helping them avoid these risks. It is common for people to dismiss information about such risks or even find it alienating. Many believe they are already aware and accounting for the risks of overdiagnosis or low value care, yet when we explore this deeper it seems not to be the case. We need to develop a new generation of strategies and tools to help people negotiate the risks of overdiagnosis and low value care. Fact-focused strategies alone are unlikely to succeed. Combining them with strategies addressing emotions, values, metacognition and other factors are a more promising direction for work. We also need to consider the broader conceptual and philosophical assumptions implicit in seeking to develop such tools. For example, to what extent is it reasonable to expect lay people to be responsible for avoiding low value care, and how does this fit into a late capitalist model of individual choice in an increasingly for-profit healthcare system? And how do we negotiate patients becoming more informed and then choosing care that we know to be low value as result? *** The project *** This is an open call for project proposals addressing the above area of research. It can be anything from message design and other intervention research, to sociological analysis, to a critical re-examination of the goals and assumptions of communicating about overdiagnosis and low value care and the role of the patient in avoiding these. It's an opportunity for you to design your own project that I will help you realise. It is usually harder (but potentially more rewarding) to design your own project. This opportunity would suit motivated students undertaking longer degrees (hons, masters, PhD). *** Potential benefits *** By undertaking this project, you will advance cutting edge research about patient-centred strategies to reduce low value care and improve patient health decision-making. You will develop your research skills, improve your writing, learn to work in an interdisciplinary team and develop you project management skills. You will have the opportunity to publish your work in a peer-reviewed journal. Our research centre has excellent opportunities for networking and further development for motivated students. You will get to do all this while pursuing a project you designed and are hopefully passionate about. *** About us *** I am a postdoctoral research fellow, using ideas from sociology, public health and social psychology to examine public understanding of health and healthcare. Our interdisciplinary team includes researchers from rheumatology, physiotherapy, implementation science, allied health, health sustainability, evidence appraisal, biostatistics and clinical epidemiology. To find out more about our research collaboration, go to: https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/