Dept. of Health chooses the Hip and Knee scores developed at Oxford for national assessment program

12 January 2009

“In his report, High Quality Care for All. NHS Next Stage Review Final Report, Professor Lord Darzi, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health, identified the importance of measuring the effectiveness of care from the patient’s own perspective. Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) capture self-assessed health states and the Next Stage Review proposes to make these measures a key mechanism in the strategy for securing improvement in the quality of care in the NHS. PROMs will be collected routinely for a number of elective surgical procedures from April 2009 as part of the NHS standard acute services contract.”

National Institute for Health Research Website, April 2009.

Oxford academics at the Health Services Research Unit (HSRU) and Isis Innovation are pleased to announce that the Department of Health has chosen the Oxford Hip and Knees scores as the questionnaires of choice for their national PROMs program.

Isis recently entered into a licence with the Department of Health in the UK for the use of the Hip and Knee scores developed at Oxford. The department will make the questionnaire available to the NHS as part of its initial Patient Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMs) program to assess the efficacy of hip and knee interventions. Initially aimed at 120,000 patients a year that receive hip and knee interventions, the results will be used to assess the improvement in the quality of life for hip and knee patients receiving treatment throughout the NHS.