BMJ  2008;336:1464-1465 (28 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.39618.627951.80

Feature

Assessing Patient Care

NHS goes to the PROMS

¹ Financial Times, London

Sir Bruce Keogh has been credited for encouraging cardiac surgeons to publish their results. Now, as the medical director of the NHS, he’s turning his attention to other specialties. Nick Timmins investigates

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

More than 12 years after the Conservative government first announced that the NHS would publish measures of outcome and mortality, the data are coming.

Previews of the first risk adjusted data on mortality from hip and knee replacements and aortic aneurysms are already on the NHS Choices website. Lord Darzi’s next stage review will promise much more, along with the development and publication of patient reported outcomes (PROMS), which use questionnaires on pain, mobility, depression and anxiety, and the ability to undertake the normal activities of daily life. Advocates of the questionnaires, which patients complete before and after treatment, say patient reported outcomes provide a remarkably sophisticated measure of whether a treatment has worked in the rather important sense of whether the patient feels better, and how much better.

Writing on the wall

How much hospitals get paid for a procedure may soon (possibly too soon) depend in part on such measurements of outcome. . . . [Full text of this article]

Sophisticated outcome measures

Mortality gets you only so far

Coding the data

Financial incentives

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