Published online Sep 12, 2020. doi: 10.5410/wjcu.v9.i1.9
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
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.
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.
Our aim was to apply our abridged PROM to our patient cohort and compare compliance rates with the conventional PROM which was previously used.
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.
We found an improved patient compliance rate with the use of our abridged PROM.
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.
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.