65 The Otology Questionnaire Amsterdam 4 Introduction Adult patients visiting an ENT surgeon can present with a variety of ear complaints ranging from hearing loss and tinnitus to dizziness. These complaints often occur simultaneously. A patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) captures the patient’s perspective and can be useful to evaluate this mix of complaints. Recently, Viergever et al searched for all existing Otology questionnaires available in the literature through a systematic review. No less than 144 unique questionnaires were identified. Several PROMs for measuring ear complaints were found. However, these questionnaires were either symptom specific (like the Tinnitus Handicap Index or Dizziness Handicap Index)1,2 or disease specific (like the Chronic-Otitis-Media Questionnaire-12 or Meniere’s disease Patient-Oriented Severity Index)3,4. No generic PROM is available for measuring the severity and impact of multiple ear complaints without diagnosis in adults visiting an ENT surgeon. Furthermore, since the use of multiple questionnaires seems unpractical in practice, a generic otology PROM that addresses all relevant types of ear complaints and their impact on quality of life is desirable in the outpatient clinic. Therefore, the Otology Questionnaire Amsterdam (OQUA) was recently developed by Bruinewoud et al 2018,5 to allow the assessment of the presence and severity of ear complaints and their impact on the quality of life of patients visiting an ENT surgeon. The OQUA was developed according to the COSMIN development guidelines and with the involvement of an expert panel, patients’ interviews and extensive field-testing, including factor analysis.5 With a validated questionnaire capable to measuring complaints and impact for all different kinds of ear complaints in the daily ENT practice, it could potentially be used in future to assess benefit of surgery from a patient perspective. In the present study, we further investigated the quality of the OQUA as an instrument to be used in the ENT practice. Our study focused on the following questions: Does the OQUA measure what it is intended to measure (validation)? Is it stable in the scores it provides (reliability)? And does it show changes when a change is expected (responsiveness) before and after an intervention? Validity was defined as the degree to which an instrument truly measures the construct6. If no ‘gold standard’ is available, then construct validity can be tested instead of criterion validity.6 The construct validity consists of two parts, namely examination of structural validity (factor analysis) and hypothesis testing. The ICC
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