Is my non-operative practice ok? – An audit tool for surgical patients

Title : Is my non-operative practice ok? – An audit tool for surgical patients

Abstract:

Aims: To develop a surgical audit tool for outpatient clinics to assess patient satisfaction.

Background: Currently there are no tools worldwide to evaluate non-operative patient satisfaction as a whole. The "IMNOPOK" (Is My Non-Operative Practice OK?) PROM will help guide surgical clinicians of all specialities to improve their patient interactions in an outpatient setting with a validated, reproducible scoring system. This will allow clinicians to identify areas of need within their practice and perform subsequent audit to ensure actions taking place as a result of any audit has been effective.

Significance to Orthopaedics: As at least half of new patients seen ion an outpatient clinic will be managed non-operatively, a verified, validated audit tool to review patient satisfaction would seem essential.

Plan: We have already performed a systematic review of the literature and based upon this have devised a questionnaire. We are now in the mid stages of data collection. Once the first round has been completed (220 questionnaires), an internal validity process will be performed with statistical analysis. This will ensure that results are reproducible within the questionnaire framework (internal validity). The questionnaire will then be rolled out to a further 220 patients to assess the “external” validity (i.e. the reproducibility in different groups of patients in the same practice to show that a “representative sample” of patients (calculated statistically) is all that is required for a formal audit. Our questionnaire addresses core surgical (medical expertise, judgement and clinical decision making) and non-surgical skills (communication, collaboration and teamwork, cultural competency and professionalism).

Timeline: We aim to have our first round of questionnaires completed by end 2026, internal validity by 1st quarter 2027, and external validity by 3rd quarter 2027.

Biography:

Chris is originally from the north of England and having attended medical school in Nottingham he returned there to commence his general surgical training. He moved to New Zealand in 2000 where he recommenced training as a specialist orthopaedic surgeon. He has completed the standard training for Australia and New Zealand, sitting the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons exam in Sydney in September 2012, moving to Australia less than a year later. He has experience of 20 years in orthopaedics, in three countries, three healthcare systems and 30 hospitals and with many, many surgical colleagues has afforded him the knowledge, skills and experience required to work well in regional practice.