PROMs Knowledge Transfer Partnership Project
What are PROMs?
Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) are questionnaires
patients complete on their health and quality of life. The
information collected from PROMs can help to monitor patient
progress, help professionals and patients discuss health issues
with each other and/or help to improve the quality of health
services.
PROMs require high reading and comprehension levels which may
exclude people with low literacy or with learning disabilities
from from using these questionnaires
effectively.
We carried out research to see how these questionnaires could be
made more accessible and easy to use, and have developed a
practical user guide for clinicians and an easy read leaflet to
explain the purpose of the PROMs survey to patients.
User Guides
Background
The project team was based at Healthcare
Improvement Scotland and the Universities of Glasgow and
Dundee.
We spoke to people with low literacy skills
and learning disabilities, other patients and health professionals
about these questionnaires.
They had several suggestions to improve PROMs
including -
- larger font sizes and tick boxes on
PROMs
- giving patients a choice of where to complete
PROMs (for example, at home or in a clinic)
- providing a quiet space for patients to
concentrate on a PROM
- offering assistance to complete a
PROM.
