The Oxford Elbow Score

A Health Outcomes Questionnaire is available from Isis tackling the assessment of outcomes following elbow surgery.

The Oxford Elbow Score (OES) is a 12-item patient-reported questionnaire specifically designed and developed for assessing outcomes of elbow surgery. To date, no other measure of outcomes specifically of elbow surgery exist that are patient-generated (by interviews), reliable, valid, responsive and developed and tested in a surgical context.

The OES is a Patient Reported Outcomes Measure (PROMs) and is therefore independent of the clinical team or surgeon who delivered the intervention. The development of the OES was driven by demands for a suitable PROM by orthopaedic surgeons who wished to measure the outcomes of their treatments from the patient’s perspective. The questionnaire was designed and developed by researchers within the Health Services Research unit, Division of Public Health and Primary Health Care, University of Oxford in association with surgical colleagues at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. The OES has been tested in a surgical context with patients and shown to be reliable, valid and responsive.

Properties of the Oxford Elbow Score (OES):

• A condition-specific questionnaire designed and developed for use in assessing surgery intervention of the elbow;
• Can be used as an indicator for recovery and general improvement in quality of life following surgery on the elbow;
• Shown to be valid, reliable and sensitive to change after rigorous testing;
• Brief and easy to complete resulting in good return rates;
• Can be completed anywhere and delivered by post, making follow-up of large numbers of patients much more feasible (and cheaper) than conducting clinical assessments;
• Easy to interpret scores;
• 3 subscales/domains capture patient views on their elbow function, pain and social-psychological condition.

Using the Oxford Elbow questionnaires developed at Oxford

A licence to use the Oxford Elbow scores developed at Oxford can be obtained by clicking here.

If you would like further information about the questionnaires you can also contact Isis Innovation at healthoutcomes@isis.ox.ac.uk or +44 (0)1865 280857.

Advice on the use of, or interpretation of data from the questionnaire is available on request.