Vancouver Coastal Health, in collaboration with the University of British Columbia, is collecting Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) to quantify the effects of waiting for surgical care. General and condition-specific health status, pain, and depression are being measured at three points during the patient’s episode of care: 1) upon registration to a surgical wait list, 2) prior to surgery, and 3) post-recovery. These repeated measurements allow us to evaluate the impact of wait time on the patient’s health while they wait for surgery and after treatment. The results may have administrative and clinical applications, including the management of waitlists and operating room resources.
This poster will describe how we responded to the following challenges in collecting the data:
1. How do we ensure that the project is relevant to policy and practice?
2. How do we access patients with the support of the surgical community?
3. Given the quality improvement (QI) mandate of VCH and the research mandate of UBC, how do we design a survey protocol that will pass legal, privacy, and ethics reviews?
Lessons learned from implementing this PROs collection include: 1) early and continuous stakeholder engagement, 2) an integrated partnership for knowledge translation, and 3) attention to the implications of privacy and patient consent on protocol design. These lessons could be adopted by healthcare professionals and researchers interested in pursuing similar work. This poster was presented at the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement’s Taming of the Queue conference in Ottawa, ON, March 21, 2013.
The poster can be viewed here.
By: Angie Chan, Project Manager, Vancouver Coastal Health; Trafford Crump, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia; Jason Sutherland, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia; Joleen Wright, Director, Data Release Management, Decision Support, Vancouver Coastal Health