Page 218 - THE DUTCH TALKING TOUCH SCREEN QUESTIONNAIRE

Chapter 5
knowledge about problems encountered by patients and clinicians in using PROMs, the worth and legitimacy of routine use of PROMs in their current state in clinical practice may need to be reconsidered. Clinicians should demand from researchers and developers that they engage representatives of the full variety of members of their target populations in the development and evaluation process of PROMs. This also means that clinicians and developers of practical guidelines should take into account whether or not researchers have considered the needs of patients with low HL in choosing recruitment, development and evaluation strategies during the development and evaluation process of a PROM. If a PROM is not tested in a research population that is representative of a ‘real life patient population’, clinicians should be very reluctant in using it in clinical practice. The chances are that such a PROM may not add to the quality of valid information exchange, not leading to better provider-patient interaction. In fact, it may diminish the quality of communication and lead to unwanted and dysfunctional situations. If clinicians get the impression that patients are not willing or able to autonomously complete a questionnaire, they should stop asking them to do so. If the specific goal of a physical therapist is not measurement of PROs but engaging patients in goal- setting, using traditional PROMs may not be the most effective way to do this.
It is of great importance that researchers keep striving for further development of user-friendly, valid and reliable questionnaires that can be used in research populations that represent ‘real life patient populations’ including native and minority patients with low HL. This will greatly benefit the generalizability and validity of PROMs in research.
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