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Steno Diabetes Copenhagen puts determined effort into work on user participation and shared decision making. With Glyn Elwyn as visiting professor, work on developing and improving user participation in diabetes will get a boost.

For the last 20 years, Professor Glyn Elwyn of the USA has been researching and teaching about shared decision making in diabetes. In shared decision making, healthcare staff and patients work together to select tests, treatment, monitoring and support on the basis of clinical evidence and the patient’s informed preferences. Glyn Elwyn has developed and implemented decision-making tools and has worked on the skills needed for shared decision making. He has also done research on how to measure these skills.

Laying the ground for several research projects

Many years of experience will therefore be brought to bear when Glyn Elwyn becomes a visiting professor at the Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen (SDCC), where Professor Kirsten Lomborg and her team are engaged in shared decision-making research, and Professor Lomborg expects Glyn Elwyn’s vast experience to lead to improved diabetes treatment and support for self-care.

‘Professor Glyn Elwyn is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of user participation and shared decision making. His Three-Talk Model of dialogue is used both in Denmark and internationally. He has also developed several tools for measuring the quality of initiatives, and tools to support collaboration between patient and healthcare staff. His visit and his work will be visible across professional boundaries, and among other things it will lay the ground for several research projects’, says Professor Kirsten Lomborg, who has been cultivating the collaborative relationship with the productive American professor since 2019, when Elwyn gave a lecture at SDCC.

Three main tasks

The Danish Diabetes Academy is supporting Glyn Elwyn’s visiting professorship to the tune of DKK 264,035. Over the next two years, Elwyn will put in stints as part of the day-to-day scene at the SDCC, where he will have three main tasks. He will take part in the research project Shared Decision Making on Everyday Health Behaviour with Type 2 Diabetes, developed by Kirsten Lomborg and her research team. The project involves decision-support tools used by healthcare staff for dialogue with people with type 2 diabetes.

He will take part in the development and testing of a virtual simulation-based course for healthcare staff, based on his Three-Talk Model, and he will also help set up an interdisciplinary, cross-sector network of colleagues with knowledge of shared decision making who use that knowledge across the institutions of the health service. Glyn Elwyn is very much looking forward to the tasks he will undertake and the visits he will make while in Denmark.

‘My stay is an opportunity to strengthen and deepen the existing work on shared decision making and user participation. I look forward to developing innovative teaching methods and helping get that knowledge out in an international network’, says Glyn Elwyn, adding that similar coproduction networks already exist in the USA and Sweden, while networks are on the way in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

In 2021, Denmark will host the international Shared Decision Making Conference with Professor Karina Dahl Steffensen, Director of the Centre for Shared Decision Making in Vejle, as one of its prime movers. The plan is for Glyn Elwyn to be involved here, too.

By Pernille Fløjstrup Andersen, Communications Officer, Danish Diabetes Academy

Facts

Name and title: Professor Glyn Elwyn, Dartmouth College, USA

Awarded DKK 264,035 by the Danish Diabetes Academy.

Project title: Developing coproduction in Denmark: Focusing on diabetes and SDM (Shared Decision Making)

Research centre: Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen (SDCC) and Dartmouth College, USA

Host: Professor Kirsten Lomborg, Senior Researcher, Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen (SDCC)

Email: glynelwyn@gmail.com

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Contact Danish Diabetes Academy

Tore Christiansen, Managing Director

Email: tore.christiansen@rsyd.dk

Tel: +45 2964 6764