Abstract
Introduction
Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are increasingly being used to assess the quality of healthcare delivery in the United Kingdom. It is important when using PROMs to know the score of the background population against which any clinical intervention maybe benchmarked. The purpose of this study was to measure an elbow-specific PROM for the population of the South West Peninsula.
Methods
We undertook a cross-sectional survey study of patients and healthcare professionals. Participants were asked to complete a simple demographic questionnaire and an Oxford Elbow Score for each elbow. Respondents with a history of elbow surgery, elbow injury, chronic elbow problems or an incomplete dataset were excluded from the study.
Results
A total of 1782 respondents (3564 elbows) completed the survey. 574 questionnaires were excluded leaving 1208 individuals (2416 elbows) for analysis. The median scores for each decade group ranged between 46.74 and 48 out of 48. There was no significant difference in the score for age, gender or hand dominance.
Conclusion
When using the Oxford Elbow Score to assess outcomes after surgery, a normal score should be used as the benchmark. This benchmark is independent of age, gender and hand dominance.
