PHIN has brought together data from thousands of private patients who have completed Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) surveys before and after they surgery for some of the UK's most common healthcare procedures which require a stay in hospital. We now publish these in a tool we call the PROMs Explorer to make it easier for patients to find the information that will help them make more informed healthcare choices.
What type of operations do PROMs cover:
PHIN collects PROMs data for for six types of surgery:
- Knee replacement
- Hip replacement
- Cataract surgery
- Breast augmentation
- Liposuction
- Rhinoplasty (commonly known as a nose job)
How PROMs can help you before treatment
We know that healthcare is a complicated area, and you are not alone if you feel you don’t understand what you are researching or being told by your GP or consultant. ‘Health literacy’ (or our understanding of healthcare) is low in the UK, and PROMs can help change that.
Looking at the PROMs scores given by other patients can help you to come up with questions to ask your consultant about aspects of treatment and recovery.
PROMs information can also help you make informed choice between private healthcare and NHS, or choice of individual provider.
You may also want to use the PROMs scores to as an additional factor, along with clinician, facility, distance, when considering your treatment options.
PROMs information helps you to understand what good quality care and treatment effectiveness looks like, and so you know what you can expect.
You can also learn about the different factors that impact your potentials outcomes and understand the reasons for following your recommended treatment plan.
How PROMs can help you after treatment
There are two key ways that PROMs can help you after you’ve had surgery. They can allow you to track progress versus expectations and see how you compare with similar people at similar stages of recovery.
Importantly, they can also help you spot any danger signals in advance, so that you seek help quickly.
Find out more about PROMs
We publish the results of PROMs in the private sector on our PROMs Explorer. This is so that you can understand how people are before treatment – to help with questions you may have like ‘Are my symptoms normal for someone before cataract surgery?’ – and then again after treatment to gain a sense of how that treatment might affect you and how you might feel at various stages of recovery.
What does the PHIN PROMs Explorer show?
PROMS results can be filtered on the tool so that you can see any reported differences by age groups, genders, ethnicities and geographical regions. This information can be helpful if you’re wanting to consider the impact of treatment for someone more like yourself. For example, if you're in your fifties, you are likely to take longer to recover from a knee operation than someone in their 20s.
The PROMs Explorer displays average scores collected for many patients. No surgery is 100% guaranteed for success for all patients; in rare cases, some patients can get worse after treatment. This tool is designed to give you more realistic and tangible expectations about the likely effects for these six surgical interventions shown above.
