The Outcomes and Experiences Questionnaire: development and validation

BACKGROUND: This report presents evidence regarding the development and validation of a new questionnaire, the Outcomes and Experiences Questionnaire (OEQ). The rationale for the questionnaire is to bring together into one short instrument questions about two distinct domains – patients’ reports of the outcomes of their care and how they experience care. METHODS: The OEQ was developed from literature reviews, iterative drafting and discussion within the research group and cognitive testing with a sample of patients who had a hospital experience. Two validation studies were carried out with an eleven item OEQ. The goals of the studies were to examine response rates and to test specific hypotheses of how OEQ should relate to other variables normally collected in the two studies. In the first study, the OEQ was added to the follow-up questionnaires for patients (n=490) receiving surgery for hip or knee replacement or varicose vein procedures participating in the national Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) program permitting the analysis of the OEQ against change scores for the measures obtained before and after surgery. In the second study the OEQ was included in a sample of patients (n=586) who had been selected to receive the National Health Service (NHS) inpatient survey from three contrasting hospital trusts. RESULTS: Results from study one provided consistent and substantial evidence of construct validity of OEQ particularly for those receiving hip or knee replacement. The OEQ sub-scales behaved differently and as predicted against other PROMs variables. Again hypotheses of how the two sub-scales regarding outcomes and experiences would relate to the existing domains of patient experience in the inpatient survey were broadly confirmed in study two. CONCLUSION: The report provides encouraging evidence of the OEQ’s capacity to assess distinct reports from patients about outcomes and experiences of care within a single short questionnaire.