Page 129 - Diagnostic delay of endometriosis

in the multidisciplinary endometriosis team of a hospital with expertise in endometriosis: a urologist and a gastro-enterologist. The response rate to the invitation letter and composition of the expert panel is given in figure 3. In order to maintain the balance in the composition of the panel, we stopped including patients after 26 consecutive consents. Women who sent their informed consent after this stop were not allowed to participate (n=3). Two of the gynaecologists who initially consented to participate withdrew: one because of a lack of time, the other did not reply to any of the emails without justification.
Baseline characteristics of participants are shown in table 1 for patients and table 2 for professionals. Of the participating patients, 68% were diagnosed with endometriosis within the past five years and 52% had a diagnostic delay of more than ten years. Eighteen women (76.9%) had received treatment for endometriosis-associated pain, and eleven (44%) were treated for subfertility. Of the GPs, sixteen (69.6 %) did not have a subspecialisation, five (21.8%) completed a two-year postgraduate training on urogynaecology and two (8.7%) had another subspecialisation. The gynaecologists were working in the fields of reproductive endocrinology (n=2, 8.3%), benign gynaecology (n=13, 52.2%) or both (n=8, 33.3%), and one was a senior resident. Most gynaecologists (n=20, 83.3%) were members of the special interest group on endometriosis of the Dutch Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
All experts who agreed to participate were invited to complete the questionnaire of all four rounds, irrespective of their participation in the previous rounds. The response rates for the online questionnaires are given in Figure 3. A summary of the results of the four questionnaire rounds is given in Figure 4 and Table 3.
Delphi round one
In the first Delphi round, 73 of the 81 (90.1%) members of the expert panel completed the online questionnaire. The response rates were 96.2% for patients and 87.3% for professionals. Data analysis resulted in the selection of six interventions and the rejection of 20 interventions (Table 3). Of the six selected interventions, five were selected from the domain “patient and professional awareness” and one from the domain “medical/scientific”. The remaining 10 interventions were labelled ‘no consensus’ (Table 3). The Mann- Whitney U-test showed significant differences in rating between patients and professionals for 24 interventions. All of these interventions were rated higher
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