Session Item

Patient experience has been associated with improvement of treatment compliance and clinical outcomes. Depending on the needs, different measurement approaches exist, including testing by the use of a questionnaire.

The aim was to create a patient questionnaire, test the feasibility of a patient reported experience measurement (PREM) and report the patient experiences at the radiation oncology (RO) department of the University Hospital Leuven. Furthermore, a short questionnaire consisting (SQ) of open questions was compared with a long questionnaire (LQ). We analyzed the retrieved data from the questionnaire and developed action points for improvement of the department. 

In this prospective study, the used questionnaire was constructed via literature research followed by a proofread of the selected and translated questions by a multidisciplinary team and finished by a pre-test conducted with a selected group of 10 patients which was performed via semi-structured interviews. Between June 2020 and October 2020, 511 patients who finished their radiotherapy treatment received a paper-based questionnaire, consisting of 56 questions, including a SQ with open questions as well as a LQ. Questionnaires were returned anonymously. Descriptive statistics were obtained from the questionnaire using SPSS. Qualitative data were thematically analyzed by NVIVO. 

308 patients returned the questionnaire (60% response rate) with 261 participants (85%) rating the overall treatment as excellent or very good; 95% of participants would recommend our RO department to a fellow patient. In the qualitative analysis, five key themes that highlighted the patient experience were identified: ‘patient education’, ‘organization’, ‘patient centered care’, ‘attitude of care providers’ and ‘general impression’. These were translated into action points for improvement. Concerning patient education, it appeared that the given information was not always received properly by the patients (only 42% indicated to have received all the information about the type of cancer, the specific treatment and general care). Furthermore, patient education and some organizational aspects of the RO department like ensuring care continuity during follow-up consultations were considered as challenges for future improvement. Regarding the evaluation of the compatibility of both questionnaire, a significant association between the overall rating in SQ  and the overall rating in LQ was found. However the single use of a SQ could have been too narrow to formulate specific action points. Therefore the SQ is seen as an add-on rather than a replacement of LQ.

The implementation of PREM at the RO department was feasible. Specific action points were framed for future improvements of the department. A mixed-method design, by integrating qualitative and quantitative data, in PREM-studies should not be overlooked.