“I’m not the doctor; I’m just the patient”: Patient agency and shared decision-making in naturally occurring primary care consultations

Objectives To explore interactional processes in which clinical decisions are made in situ during medical consultations, particularly the ways in which patients show agency in decision-making processes by proposing and opposing actions, and which normative dimensions and role-expectations their engagement entail. Methods Narrative analysis of verbatim transcripts of 22 naturally occurring consultations, sourced from a corpus of 212 consultations between general practitioners and patients in England. After thematically coding the whole dataset, we selected 22 consultations with particularly engaged patients for in-depth analysis. Results Patients oppose further actions more often than they propose actions, and they oppose more directly than they propose. When they explain why they propose and oppose something, they reveal their values. Patients’ role-performance changes throughout the consultations. Conclusion Assertive patients claim – and probably also achieve – most influence when they oppose actions directly and elaborate why. Patients display ambiguous role-expectations. In final concluding stages of decision-making processes, patients usually defer to GPs’ authority.