Improving shared decision-making in a clinical obstetric ward by using the three questions intervention, a pilot study

Background Shared decision-making (SDM) is an important aspect of modern health care. Many studies evaluated different interventions to improve SDM, however, none in an inpatient clinical setting. A tool that has been proven effective in an outpatient department is the three questions intervention. These questions are created for patients to get optimal information from their medical team and to make an informed medical decision. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility and effectiveness of this simple intervention on SDM in the obstetric inpatient department of a university hospital in the Netherlands.