HOSPITALS will soon be ranked according to how successful patients feel their operation went thanks to a system devised in Oxford.

Since April, surgeons at the city’s Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre have been giving feedback forms to patients to rate how well their surgery went and then how they felt six months down the line.

Now the NHS has decided to adopt the system – Patient Reported Outcome Measures (Proms) – as part of a national programme to improve the outcomes of surgery.

Once the information from patients at all hospitals which provide hip and knee surgery has been collated, it will be uploaded to a database and the hospital will be ranked.

This will then be put on the NHS Choices website so patients can make a decision where to have their surgery based on how well other patients felt their treatment went.

Prof Andy Carr, director of the Biomedical Research Unit, said: “While an operation might go well on the day from the surgeon’s perspective, the patient may have a different view if six months later they continue to have pain or poor function of their hip or knee.

“This system would enable NHS hospitals to more effectively measure post-operative success according to patient satisfaction and their quality of life.”

The questionnaires ask patients to rate how painful they feel activities are before and after surgery. They are asked to rank from one to five how easy things like kneeling down, getting in and out of a car, or sitting at a table are, as well as more complex tasks.

The programme, devised in conjunction with Oxford University, is the first of its kind in the world.

Clinical director at the NOC Dr Karen Barker said: “We looked at the patient scores following knee operations and realised that many patients were reporting that they were not kneeling.

“There was no clinical reason why they should not be able to kneel but our study found that patients failed to resume this activity.

“As a result, we have changed our practices and now include specific instruction in kneeling as part of our standard post-operative physiotherapy treatment.”

awilliams@oxfordmail.co.uk