Shared decision making and high blood pressure

Shared decision making and high blood pressureEvidence-based practice has patients' values and preferences as one of its 3 pillars.To properly elicit this pillar, health professionals need to do shared decision making (SDM).To do SDM, clinicians need to be provided with information that would allow them to discuss with patients the risks of their medical condition, the different treatment options and the potential benefits and harms associated with these treatments.Hopefully, most pharmacists would wish to practise in this way.The decisions around the treatment of high blood pressure (HBP) are an ideal opportunity for SDM.There is solid evidence that some HBP treatments reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk.However, it is important to remember that HBP for the good majority of patients is an asymptomatic risk factor that does not progress to morbidity, and most people, despite a lifetime of treatment, will not derive a CVD benefit. 1 In addition, all HBP pharmacologic treatments are associated with the potential for adverse effects, and all incur an inconvenience and cost that an individual patient would have to balance against the possibility of benefit.In their recent article in the January/February 2018 issue of CPJ, 2 the authors presented what they felt were the update highlights and the important elements from the most recent 2017 Hypertension Canada guidelines. 3 I read their article with the eye of seeing if one could extract information from this update that would help pharmacists engage in SDM.It was disappointing to find that within the 9 pages of this article, there was not a single mention of the following key aspects/treatment information