What matters to users of services? An explorative study to promote shared decision making in health care.

Background: Involving service users and carers in decisions about their health care is a key feature of health-care practice. Professional health and social care students need to develop skills and attributes to best enable this to happen.

Aims: The aims were to explore service user and carer perceptions of behaviours, attributes and context required to enable shared decision making; to compare these perceptions to those of students and academic staff with a view to utilizing the findings to inform the development of student assessment tools.