Ong M, Duncan C, McGrail M, Desai DJ. Evaluation of patient reported outcome measures post urethroplasty: Piloting a “Trifecta” approach. World J Clin Urol 2020; 9(1): 9-15 [DOI: 10.5410/wjcu.v9.i1.9]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Michelle Ong, MBBS, Doctor, Department of Urology, Toowoomba Hospital, 154 Pechey Street, Toowoomba 4350, Queensland, Australia. mhmong8@hotmail.com
Research Domain of This Article
Urology & Nephrology
Article-Type of This Article
Retrospective Study
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Clin Urol. Sep 12, 2020; 9(1): 9-15 Published online Sep 12, 2020. doi: 10.5410/wjcu.v9.i1.9
Evaluation of patient reported outcome measures post urethroplasty: Piloting a “Trifecta” approach
Michelle Ong, Catriona Duncan, Matthew McGrail, Devang J Desai
Michelle Ong, Catriona Duncan, Devang J Desai, Department of Urology, Toowoomba Hospital, Toowoomba 4350, Queensland, Australia
Matthew McGrail, Department of Head Regional Training Hub Research, University of Queensland Rural Clinical School, Rockhampton 4700, Queensland, Australia
Devang J Desai, University of Queensland Rural Clinical School, Toowoomba 4350, Queensland, Australia
Author contributions: Ong M and Duncan C were involved in study design, data collection, and manuscript writing; McGrail M was involved in statistical analysis of the data and collation of tables and result graphs; Desai D was involved through the supervision of the study and revision of the subsequent drafts of the manuscript; All authors have read and approve the final manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: The collection of this data was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of Darling Downs Health Service.
Informed consent statement: Patients were not required to give informed consent to the study because the analysis used anonymous clinical data that were obtained after each patient agreed to treatment by written consent.
Conflict-of-interest statement: We can declare that there are no conflict of interests
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Michelle Ong, MBBS, Doctor, Department of Urology, Toowoomba Hospital, 154 Pechey Street, Toowoomba 4350, Queensland, Australia. mhmong8@hotmail.com
Received: March 22, 2020 Peer-review started: March 22, 2020 First decision: April 18, 2020 Revised: May 27, 2020 Accepted: September 1, 2020 Article in press: September 1, 2020 Published online: September 12, 2020 Processing time: 170 Days and 8.3 Hours
ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS
Research background
Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) are an important measure of patient satisfaction pre- and post-urethroplasty There are very few urethroplasty-specific PROMs and those that exist are usually very length and tedious to complete. It has also been shown that patients’ perceived outcomes often do not align with the conventional measures by which urethroplasty surgeons determine success and as such, lack of surgical complications does not necessarily indicate patient satisfaction.
Research motivation
PROMs are notoriously lengthy and tedious to complete. This results in poor patient compliance with PROMs. Given urethroplasty is predominantly a lifestyle procedure, it is important to gain an accurate sense of patient’s perceived outcomes from surgery as this will determine patient satisfaction with their quality of life. This sparked our motivation to develop an abridged PROM which focused on the Trifecta of Urethroplasty (flow, sexual function and quality of life), so as to improve patient compliance rates and thus, increase the accuracy of our PROMs.
Research objectives
Our aim was to apply our abridged PROM to our patient cohort and compare compliance rates with the conventional PROM which was previously used.
Research methods
We performed a retrospective analysis on patients who had previously completed a conventional PROM. We then invited all patients to participate in the abridged PROM. We recorded their responses and compared compliance rates.
Research results
We found an improved patient compliance rate with the use of our abridged PROM.
Research conclusions
We advocate the use of this abridged PROM as a screening tool to easily identify patients who may not have perceived satisfaction with their urethroplasty surgery and can therefore, be investigated further.
Research perspectives
Abridged PROMs can be utilized pre- and post- urethroplasty to help obtain a more accurate sense of patient satisfaction and to also easily identify patients who may require further investigation, counselling or revision based on their level of satisfaction with their surgery. Future research should be performed to validate abridged, urethroplasty-specific PROMs which can also be widely used.
