All NHS patients who are having hip or knee replacements, varicose vein surgery or groin hernia surgery are being invited to fill in PROMs questionnaires. PROMs are Patient Reported Outcome Measures.
The NHS is asking patients about their health and quality of life before they have an operation, and about their health and the effectiveness of the operation after it. This will help the NHS measure and improve the quality of its care.
How can I take part?
When you go to hospital, you will be asked to fill in a short questionnaire before your operation. Once you've filled in your consent form and completed your questionnaire, your answers will be held by the NHS Information Centre.
A few months later, depending on which sort of operation you had, you'll be sent a follow-up questionnaire (an after your operation questionnaire) to fill in and send back. The information you give will help the NHS to measure and improve the quality of health services. For more details on how your information is used please select the 'Patient information' page.
The NHS uses a contractor to support it in the operation of PROMs. The contract to run the national PROMs programme has been awarded by the Department of Health to Northgate Information Solutions.
Northgate Information Solutions runs the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) system for the NHS, and has done so for many years. It also runs the National Joint Registry (NJR) for hip and knee replacement surgery and the NHS Newborn Hearing Screening Programme (NHSP).
Northgate has commissioned Quality Health to run the survey segment of the programme. Quality Health is a specialist health-only survey provider, which works for 320 NHS trusts and is the largest survey provider to the NHS.
PROMs: listening to patients
Watch a video explaining how you can help the NHS to measure and improve the quality of health services
Last reviewed: 22/04/2009
Next review due: 21/04/2011
