Clinical outcome assessment in hand surgery

Project leader: Dr Jeremy Rodrigues, Academic Clinical Fellow

Jeremy’s project has a double aim: a) to apply modern standards for assessing the validity, responsiveness and interpretability of existing patient-reported outcome measures, and b) to better understand the impact of common hand conditions and their treatment in a patient-centred manner.

Jeremy is establishing an international multi-centre collaboration to conduct the studies, with the aim of broadening the applicability of the findings. He has been appointed to a National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Fellowship, and previously held a NICE Scholarship. Through this, he is interested in aligning the validated outcomes used in high-quality studies with the national processes that assess cost utility and support implementation in the NHS, such as NICE’s Technology Appraisal programme, and clinical guideline development.                  

Jeremy is also co-supervising a DPhil student who is working on a mixed-methods project investigating Dupuytren’s disease outcome.

Both projects will contribute to the design of randomised controlled trials in hand surgery to be conducted through the Reconstructive Surgery Trials Network (RSTN). This is a joint venture between the British Society for Surgery of the Hand (BSSH) and The British Association for Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery (BAPRAS).

Better understanding clinical outcome will also support the BSSH’s national audit database. Jeremy is a member of the core team that maintains and updates the database.

June 2015