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Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs)

There is increasing recognition on the importance of measuring outcomes in health care. One method of doing this is through the use of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs). These are indicators that measure quality from the patient perspective. A recent letter published in the British Medical Journal discussed the role of PROMs in promoting equity of access to elective health care. Preoperative measurement of PROMS, which is now routine for some NHS-funded procedures, can provide information about perceived needs and how this varies across referred populations by deprivation score or other socio-demographic factors. We already know that for some interventions, including hip replacement, postoperative improvement is strongly associated with preoperative PROM disease severity. This is demonstrated by data from the English hip replacement audit in the figure above. Using PROMs as part of an intervention threshold in elective surgery could improve both equity and efficiency, and their use in this role should be explored further.

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