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Designing PROMS for intermediate care dental services

Taking PROMS and PREMS and applying them to specialist dental practice in the intermediate setting, using digitally enhanced methods. Enhancing patients ability to feedback and to capture data for service improvement.

Read comments 5
  • Idea
  • 2018

Meet the team: Dental Outcomes Matter

Also:

  • Tim Williams: MyClinicalOutcomes

Patient Related Outcome Measures have grown in popularity as a means of providing qualitative data to determine the real-time effects of interventions for patients. They are useful for both analysing clinical services as well as supporting clinicians in personal development assessing their impact on patient outcomes.

We have largely seen these used in secondary care and although other KPIs have made their way into primary care, there are is little in the way of projects looking to integrate this into dental care. Furthermore, some of the nationally designed PROMS have yet to make their mark given their complexity and difficulty in integrating into daily practice with cumbersome designs putting many clinicians off their use. Since the introduction of new commissioning guides in dentistry in 2015, we have seen a steady movement of dental services from secondary care into primary care where access and service availability is greatly improved with cost savings attached. So far we are yet to see KPIs really being used to any great extent in order to truly provide an accurate picture that can support clinically lead commissioning at this level.

Our idea is to take some of the already established and leading software algorithms already developed and both customise and integrate these into selected regional, specialist dental services. The aim is to pilot the effectiveness of PROMS at this level within dentistry in order to:

  • Understand the true impact of intermediate level services
  • Analyse the variation between individual service providers
  • Support commissioners in developing real usable data
  • Support quality improvement initiatives in dentistry

We also want to be able to give clinicians the ability the understand the impact of their treatment on a personal level so that we can begin to drive prospective improvement on an individual level.

Furthermore, dental surgery such as tooth extraction make up some of the most commonly performed surgical procedures in the NHS and we have little if no real understanding of the true effect of these procedures on patients quality of life; with this project we have an opportunity to learn more about the impact of dental disease and treatments on our patients.

How you can contribute

  • Support with project management
  • Input from others having run similar initiatives in primary care in other healthcare sectors
  • Ideas on patient engagement
  • Those interested in joining and supporting dentistry!

Comments

  1. Guest

    Martin Dempster 14 Jun 2018

    The assessment of quality of life among patients receiving services is often alluded to but rarely done well. So, its great to see a project with an emphasis on this. We have a quality of life research group here at Queen's University Belfast and I am sure members would be happy to discuss/advise on your project.

    1. Sure thing Martin, it would interesting to involve you if we get further along if you're happy to be a part of the team

  2. Hi Tim

    Ok great would be brilliant to have a chat about what you do and how we might be able to work together. Send me your number and we can speak properly?

     

    thanks

     

    sam

  3. We could be interested to help with this. I have been developing a range of generic PROMs and PREMs for use by patients and staff.

    I used to be married to a dentist, so I know a bit about the field. I am not convinced that dentistry is so very different from other specialties that it really warrants development of specialty-specific metrics.

    1. Hi Tim Ok great would be brilliant to have a chat about what you do and how we might be able to work together. Send me your number and we can speak properly?   thanks   Sami

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