measuring the recovery of barts health patients with electronic follow-up

Conditions: Surgery; Critical Illness; Trauma

Summary: more and more people are surviving emergency, life-threatening illnesses. however, survival often comes at a cost to patients' wellbeing. many suffer from being so ill in ways not necessarily related to their original illness. patients struggle with their normal activities of daily living or to do the job they did before. they struggle to live independently, to enjoy a normal diet, or to be pain-free. this leads to a decrease in their quality of life, placing a burden on families. investigators don't have a good method of highlighting and representing the issues faced by these patients. investigators have recently implemented a service innovation project, using an an app-based questionnaire in two groups (patients that survive emergency surgery, and those who survive critical illness) to highlight these problems early, so that individuals are offered the right help and services to return to living their lives as fully as possible. patients will be asked to fill in an electronic (on-line) questionnaire while in hospital, and at 1 and 6 months afterwards. along side this investigators intend to perform a qualitative assessment of the value and acceptability of this project. investigators will interview patients approximately 2-3 weeks after the questionnaire completion at 1 and 6 months to determine how easy it was to use, how acceptable the process was and how well it described and highlighted their problems. if this system works, it would become part of routine care, extended to patients admitted as emergencies to hospital, and used to develop a national program for all uk hospital patients

this is a qualitative study, with data collected through semi-structured interviews with patients and clinical staff with experience of using the epro system. topic guides for both patients and clinicians have been developed based upon previous similar studies and with input from our study ppi group. the patients for qualitative study will be consented by the coordinator. this will be done when the patients are invited to participate in the prosper study. the epro project is a service evaluation project registered with the clinical effectiveness unit (ceu). the sample for qualitative study will be based on age, gender, ethnicity, language spoken, digital literacy and reason for admission. patients who consent to participate will be interviewed twice about their experience of using the epro system. interviews will be done approximately 2-3 weeks after the epro questionnaire completion time points of 1 and 6 months respectively. interviews will follow the interview topic guide, with semi-structured questions exploring both the research objectives as above, will be conducted on the telephone and will be audio recorded and transcribed. clinicians and health care staff will also be interviewed to assess their perception of usefulness of the electronic questionnaires.

Eligibility criteria:
inclusion criteria: * patients undergoing emergency laparotomy, regardless of admission to the adult critical care unit. * patients requiring level 3 care admitted to the adult critical care unit with length of stay of \>56 hours * clinical staff involved in the pathway of care affected by the epro. * purposive sampling to include patients based on age, gender, ethnicity, language spoken, digital literacy and reason for admission exclusion criteria: those patients \<18 years of age * those not expected to survive 3 months post discharge; as per clinical decision making * patients unable to consent to and without carers able to consent;