Patient Judgement of Change with Elective Surgery Correlates with Patient Reported Outcomes and Quality of Life

Obtaining pre‐surgery PROM measures is not always feasible. The aim of this study was to examine if self‐reports of change following elective surgery correlate with change scores from a validated PROM (15‐item Quality of Recovery (QoR‐15)). This cross‐sectional study across 29 hospitals enrolled elective surgery patients. PROMs were collected one‐week pre‐surgery, as well as one‐ and four‐weeks post‐surgery via an electronic survey. We examined associations between patient “judgement of change” at one and four‐weeks after surgery and the actual pre‐to post‐surgery PROM change scores. A total of 4177 surveys were received. The correlation between patient judgement of change, and the actual change score was moderately strong at one‐week (n = 247, rs = 0.512, p < 0.001), yet low at four‐weeks (n = 241, rs = 0.340, p < 0.001). Patient judgement was aligned to the direction of the PROM change score from pre‐ to post‐surgery. We also examined the correlation between the QoR‐15 (quality of recovery) and the EQ‐5D‐5L (QOL). There was a moderately strong positive correlation between the two PROMs (n = 356, rs = 0.666, p < 0.001), indicating that change in quality of recovery was related to change in QOL. These findings support the use of a single “judgement of change” recall question post‐surgery.