Informing and actively involving patients and their families in decision-making is a goal of patient- and family-centred health care.1 Shared decision-making is a collaborative process that enables healthcare decisions to be made between patients and/or families and clinicians, with consideration of patient values and preferences, while also using the best available scientific evidence to make recommendations.2 This collaborative process is recommended by critical care societies3 and healthcare organisations internationally.[4], [5], [6] Patients in intensive care units (ICUs) are often incapacitated and unable to communicate their treatment preferences. In these instances, the patients' families and friends assume the role of surrogate decision-makers (surrogates). Often, these surrogates find themselves in family meetings with clinicians where they are faced with challenging decisions made even more complex by the uncertainty of patient prognoses.1 Scheunemann et al.7 recently explored this important area in a study of 249 family conferences, analysing how patient values and preferences are elicited during family meetings and how these preferences are applied to shared decisions made between surrogates and clinicians. A critique of this article is presented in the following.