What is your postop patient recovery / monitoring requirement and which scale best fits that need?
29th April 2022
The Clinical Outcomes team at Oxford University Innovation have brought together a portfolio of COA instruments to tackle the need of effectively monitoring or measuring various aspects of post-surgical recovery and outcomes.
What is postoperative care?
Postoperative care is the direct care patients receive following a surgical procedure. The type of postoperative care patients receive depends on the type of surgery they have, as well as their health history. Postoperative care assesses the recovery of health and function of the patient. As highlighted by NICE’s evidence review for perioperative care in adults, most complications and factors relating to poor outcomes occur during the post-operative phase of surgery.
Within the clinical outcomes assessments (COA) portfolio from Oxford, there are available, a number of validated instruments specifically for measuring postoperative recovery.
The Oxford postoperative recovery package
| Bluebelle Wound Healing Questionnaire | Oxford Arthroplasty Early Recovery & Change Scores | The Post-operative Quality of Recovery Scale (PostopQRS™) | The Oxford Participation and Activities Questionnaire (OxPAQ) | |
| Area of post-surgery application | Assessment of surgical site infection (SSI) in closed primary wounds | Assessing change, recovery pathways and interventions in the first six weeks following lower limb surgery | Assessing the quality of recovery of patients undergoing surgery and/or anaesthesia | Generic PRO measure to assess participation and activity in patients experiencing a range of conditions post-surgery |
| Type of COA | PRO, ClinRO | PRO | PRO, ClinRo and PerfO | PRO |
| Concepts assessed | Signs, symptoms and wound care interventions indicative of SSI | Pain, sleep, nausea and feeling unwell, mobility | Physiologic, nociceptive, functional, cognitive, emotional recovery, patient perspective | Participation and Activity |
| Key attributes | Easy to use
Acceptable within test population Good construct validity Reliable Valid |
Easy to use
Simple scoring system Good measurement properties Can be used as an ‘acute’ perioperative measure of recovery in combination with the Oxford Hip and Knee Scores, with their longer-term recall periods “As surgeons, once our patients are discharged from our care following surgery, they enter a black hole where we lose sight of how they are progressing with their new hip or knee. The OARs and OACs are the assessment tools by which we can now monitor those patients that were previously invisible to us in the days and weeks immediately following hip or knee replacement surgery.“ – Professor Oliver Pearce, FRCS, Consultant Trauma and Orthopaedics |
PostopQRSTM is a measuring tool which can be used to establish a pre-operative / pre-procedure baseline and then track recovery either post-operatively after surgery / or post intervention where anaesthesia or sedation has been used
Available as a web-based tool and can be easily accessed by a laptop, tablet or smartphone The domains it focuses on relating to quality of recovery are: cognition, pain and/or nausea, functional ability, anxiety and depression and satisfaction This measuring tool gives clinicians the potential to identify deteriorating patients faster and reliably Enhances patient/ clinician contact and allows the patient to discuss any concerns they might have at the time they have them. Deploying the PostopQRS via telephone interview post-discharge has been validated and allows both patient / health care professional follow up time |
A modern 23-item generic questionnaire developed in accordance with FDA good practice guidelines
Grounded on the World Health Organisation International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health Also, available as an acute version, with emphasis of a 1 week recall period compared with the normal 4 week recall By measuring Participation and activity the OxPAQ measures key metrics in the return to optimal health post-surgery |
| Find out more | Find out more about Recovery Score | Find out more | Find out more |
For further information and Licensing enquiries, please do contact us via email at healthoutcomes@innovation.ox.ac.uk.
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