As part of Evidence-Based Medicine, it is important to be able to share all relevant information with patients so that they can be part of the decision making process. How comfortable do you feel discussing risks and benefits when discussing interventions and treatments with patients?
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists | RCOG has a patient guide for Understanding how risk is discussed in health care. This guide tells patients what they can expect from their clinicians.
"Healthcare professionals use research evidence to describe the chance of an event occurring in the context of an entire population."
The General Medical Council provides guidance in Decision making and consent and states
"You must give patients clear, accurate and up-to-date information, based on the best available evidence, about the potential benefits and risks of harm of each option, including the option to take no action."
If you're not confident in being able to do this, you could contact UHCW Knowledge and Library Services to discuss training, or your own Library and Knowledge Service if you are not based at UHCW.
The guide also describe how risk should be explained to patients.
"So your healthcare professional can tell you one woman in nine (1 in 9) will develop breast cancer."
The Patient Information Forum has a guide for Healthcare professionals, Communicating benefits, risks and uncertainties and it also highlights the importance of the way that risk is discussed, using numbers and not words and ensuring that the use of numbers is consistent and understandable to people with varying numeracy skills.
"Use natural frequencies rather than percentages, for example 10 in 100, rather than 10%. When giving people two frequencies to compare, make sure they are both expressed as ‘out of’ the same number. For example, 1 in 100 compared with 2 in 100, NOT 1 in 100 compared with 1 in 50."
Do you feel you could use a reminder of the statistics behind it all? The guide above is a great starting point, and has useful references for further reading. Ranganathan, Aggarwal, and Pramesh (2015) wrote Common pitfalls in statistical analysis: Odds versus risk as part of a series on understanding statistics. Andrade (2015) wrote the enticingly titled Understanding relative risk, odds ratio, and related terms: as simple as it can get, which is surely what all of us non-statisticians wish for.