How Decisions are Made

Elena Rocca, Thinking about guidelines:

I was interested in a question that Sietse threw at us many times: what should be the purpose of a guideline? What does “helping to make a good decision” mean?

We got some inputs about it throughout the whole day: it might mean including the patient view, or reporting only the evidence with no recommendation, or giving recommendation but being transparent about which evidence was considered and how it was judged, or again, as Sietse suggested, it might mean to explain what is “to make an inference”, what happens when a clinical decision is made. I was particularly interested in this last suggestion, and I felt it remained a bit “in the air”. Does it mean that we would need a guideline about the decision process? About the implicit and sometimes unaware stand that the clinician takes by valuing one or the other evidence, following the guideline versus personal judgement?