Oxford Health Questionnaires Used by NHS
22nd June 2009
The University of Oxford and Oxford University Innovation, the University’s technology transfer company, are pleased to announce that the Department of Health has chosen Oxford-developed health outcomes questionnaires for their national Patient Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMs) programme.
Oxford Health Questionnaires
Outcomes measures have already been adopted widely within academic research and by pharmaceutical companies to measure the effectiveness of new therapies in clinical trials as well as by healthcare delivery organisations to assess quality and effectiveness of care.
The Department of Health has chosen the Oxford Hip and Knees scores as the questionnaires of choice for assessing the efficacy of hip and knee interventions. These Patient Reported Outcomes are part of a portfolio of condition-specific outcome measures developed by Oxford’s Health Services Research Unit (HSRU). Initially aimed at 120,000 patients a year that receive hip and knee interventions, the results will be used to assess the improvement in the quality of life for hip and knee patients receiving treatment throughout the NHS.
In a recent report, Professor Lord Darzi, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health, identified PROMs as a key mechanism in the strategy for securing improvement in the quality of care in the NHS.
“PROMs will be collected routinely for a number of elective surgical procedures from April 2009 as part of the NHS standard acute services contract,” he stated in the High Quality Care for All report.
“PROMs focus attention on patients’ own perceptions about their condition, before and then following a health care intervention, and we believe that they can provide a big step forward in guiding best practice in patient treatment and monitoring,” said Jill Dawson, one of the key researchers in the group.
The Oxford Health Services Research Unit also includes authors of the industry-standard Parkinsons’ disease health outcomes questionnaire, PDQ-39, the mostly widely used outcomes measure for that condition. The group has developed a number of condition-specific questionnaires for motor neurone disease and endometriosis as well as joint-specific scores for elbow, shoulder, and foot and ankle conditions.
Ray Fitzpatrick – a co-researcher in the group added: “Pharmaceutical companies use the questionnaires both in clinical trials and after the launch of new therapies to monitor their success. PROMs also provide a patient perspective on clinical outcomes to health authorities such as the NHS as well as private healthcare providers,”
“We are also seeing other groups following the NHS lead in incorporating patient reported outcomes into the standard assessment of therapies to ensure they deliver benefits to patients.”
The Oxford Health Questionnaires outcomes are available from Oxford University Innovation.
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