Abstract
Purpose :
What is successful glaucoma treatment? Whilst clinical measures of intraocular pressure and visual fields remain important, the evolving concept of successful treatment now extends to subjective measures i.e. patients’ quality of life and treatment burden. These are not easily interpretable by healthcare providers and this is where PROMs questionnaires can play an important role. Our study aims to qualitatively explore the use of PROMs questionnaires for use in routine clinical practice in the Singapore context.
Methods :
A literature review of existing glaucoma-specific PROMs questionnaires was done. The 4 most promising questionnaires cited were selected for use. Semi-structured interviews including healthcare workers involved in managing glaucoma patients and patients themselves were done to elicit their viewpoints of the use of PROMs questionnaires in clinical practice. Thematic analysis of the interviews was then undertaken. A feasibility survey was carried out to provide quantitative data to complement the interviews.
Results :
40 participants were recruited consisting of 16 healthcare workers and 24 glaucoma patients with varying disease severity. A total of 286 comments were recorded from the semi-structured interviews. Following analysis, the comments were dichotomized into 2 themes: relating to the content and relating to the actual administration of the questionnaire. The feasibility survey showed majority of glaucoma patients (79%) and medical professionals (94%) felt PROMs questionnaire have a role to play in glaucoma management.
Conclusions :
There is general support for the use of PROMs questionnaire in routine practice. Each questionnaire has strengths and weaknesses and further work will have to be done to contextualize them to improve relevance. We also identified difficulties in logistical execution that may act as barriers to a successful implementation of routine questionnaire administration in a busy clinic. We feel work needs to be done before a large scale PROMs questionnaire program can be rolled out.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.