Resources

Tools to help you design risk and uncertainty communications and guides on best practices for designing communications.

Tools for developing risk communications

Guide to design a Fact Box: A Fact Box presents a simple tabular summary of the best available evidence about the benefits and harms of a medical procedure, treatment, or health behaviour. Here you can find a brief overview of the key features of a Fact Box to help you get started.

riskyr is an open source software developed in R with an accompanying interactive R Shiny app for developing interactive representations of risk-related information. The app was developed by:

Neth, H., Gaisbauer, F., Gradwohl, N., & Gaissmaier, W. (2021). riskyr: A toolbox for rendering risk literacy more transparent. Social Psychology and Decision Sciences, University of Konstanz, Germany. Computer software (R package version 0.3.0, Mar. 23, 2021). Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=riskyr

Guidelines on designing risk communications

Guidelines for how to design Fact Boxes or Icon Arrays, and principles to improve public understanding and management of risk.

CAPUR expert committee principles for risk management

Ball, D., Humpherson, E., Johnson, B., McDowell, M, Ng, R., Radaelli, C., Renn, O., Seedhouse, D., Spiegelhalter, D., Uhl, Al. \& Watt, J. (2019, December). Improving Society's Management of Risks: A Statement of Principles. Collaboration to explore new avenues to improve public understanding and management of risk (CAPUR). Atomium -- European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy.

Best practice guideline for developing fact boxes

McDowell, M, Rebitschek, F, Gigerenzer, G, & Wegwarth, O (2016). A simple tool for communicating the beneﬁts and harms of health interventions: A guide for creating a fact box. MDM Policy & Practice (1), 1-10. doi:10.1177/2381468316665365

 @article{mcdowell2016a,
  title = {A Simple Tool for Communicating the Benefits and Harms of Health Interventions: A Guide for Creating a Fact Box},
  author = {McDowell, Michelle and Rebitschek, Felix G. and Gigerenzer, Gerd and Wegwarth, Odette},
  date = {2016-07-01},
  journaltitle = {MDM Policy \& Practice},
  volume = {1},
  pages = {2381468316665365},
  doi = {10.1177/2381468316665365},
  number = {1}
}

Best practices for presenting information in decision aids

Recently, Medical Decision Making published a series of papers updating the patient decision aids standards (IPDAS) including on basing information comprehensive syntheses of evidence, presenting probabilities, and challenges to presenting numbers in patient decision aids.