Outcomes and experiences of clinical care in common hand conditions.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Outcomes and experiences of clinical care in common hand conditions: the patient's perspective.
IRAS ID
188343
Contact name
Hawys Lloyd- Hughes
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford- Clinical Trials and Research Governance
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 0 days
Research summary
Primary outcomes in hand surgery have traditionally been defined using objective measures such as grip strength or finger joint angles for example. These typically assess specific aspects of structural or functional impairment. These clinician- centred measures do not address patients concerns and may not be the most important outcomes of their treatment, may not have much effect on their health related quality of life and therefore not very useful tools for measuring outcome. A range of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are currently in use in hand surgery but the majority have not been developed using current standard methods and there is limited evidence of their validity and reliability. More-over, feedback from patients during PPI groups indicate that these available PROMs do not address their concerns and expectation.
Without a reliable tool to measure patient focused outcomes it is difficult to perform any meaningful clinical research to determine best practice.
More information is also required about the choices made by patients with regards to their procedures; what preference they have, why and what trade-offs are they willing to accept for what outcomes. It is also important to understand what patients think of their experience of their treatment journey throughout.
This research will use a qualitative approach to determine what are the outcomes most important to patients in the context of hand surgery. This will relate to treatment outcomes as well as evaluating their experiences.REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Sheffield Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/YH/0422
Date of REC Opinion
22 Sep 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion