Page 137 - Diagnostic delay of endometriosis

“Develop decision aid/diagnostics aid for patients and GPs to use during consultation”. The interventions were from the domains “patient and professional awareness” and “medical/scientific”.
Delphi round four
Thirteen interventions were selected from the first three rounds, of which four were combined into one intervention concerning guideline development. The final set therefore consisted of ten interventions, which were submitted to the complete expert panel (Box 1). The selected interventions were from the domains “patient and professional awareness” (n=7) and “medical/scientific” (n=3). No interventions were selected from the domains “patient behaviour” and “miscellaneous”. In the fourth Delphi round, 79 panel members evaluated the final set of interventions. Of the responding participants, 76 (96.2%) approved the final set of selected interventions. Two panel members did not agree and one panel member abstained from assessment. The panel members who did not agree were both gynaecologists. Reasons for disagreement were a lack of interventions directed at online distribution of information in order to increase awareness and an excessive focus on medical staff instead of the involvement of patients, the society and the patient interest group. The panel member who abstained from assessment was from the subgroup of “other professionals”. This panel member stated that he was not able to make a reasonable judgement based on his knowledge.
Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first report on the selection of interventions aimed at reducing the diagnostic delay of endometriosis and can be seen as a first step in the development of a targeted strategy to reduce this delay. The study was directed exclusively at factors related to the timely diagnosis of endometriosis, other aspects of endometriosis care were not taken into account.
The multidimensional set of key interventions selected by the expert panel covers the education of health care professionals from the basic curriculum for medical students up to post academic training for clinical specialists, the development of an interdisciplinary clinical guideline, the design of a decision aid for guidance during consultations and expansion of scientific research directed at non-invasive diagnostic tests. Differences in scoring behaviour were seen between patients and professionals, and between
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