Prof. Nick Black (London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene) gave last night an excellent update on the status of the Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) Programme in a seminar hosted by the Royal Statistical Society. The PROMs programme is a prospective collection of PROMs data before and after elective surgical interventions.
In a nutshell, the programme is in good health, with variable response rates, very reasonable for joint replacements (hip & knee), less so for varicose veins and groin hernias. The programme is being expanded in at least three different ways: additional interventions (coronary revsacularization), and pilots in relation to Primary Care and Long Term Conditions (LTC) and in Emergency care. Prof. Ray Fitzpatrick (Oxford) also provided some information on the current status of the LTC pilot.
Some questions from the floor focussing on sampling and representativeness issues were convincingly addressed by the speaker. There were also questions in relation to how to guarantee better linkage of PROMs data with other clinical information (e.g., Primary Care records).
The issue of how this information could be used for clinical management of individual patients was central to some comments, recognizing the potential impact of these measurements for clinical practice. This is exactly the focus of our programme of research on the use of individualized and standardized PROMs for improving Primary Care for people with multi-morbidity.
No comments:
Post a Comment