89 Quality assessment of patient reported outcome measures for patients with multiple ear complaints 5 Introduction The high prevalence of ear complaints, the call for shared decision making and need to evaluate and improve treatment modalities in a way to improve health care, have contributed to a rising interest in patient reported outcome measures (PROMs). PROMs can be used as an essential tool next to clinical outcomes and elemental in Value Based Health Care, as outcomes ‘that matters most to the patient’ are valued to the costs to reach these outcomes. PROMS can be generic or specific. They can be developed to obtain information on a specific complaint, disability or disease, perceived quality of life (QoL) and may be developed for a specific population (e.g. adults or children). A Generic PROM can be used to measure pain, depression, fatigue or anxiety for example. Successful applicability of a PROM is dependent on the type and quality of the questionnaire. In otology, a questionnaire that focusses on multiple complaints can be domain- or disease specific PROMs. This is thought to be important, as many patients with ear diseases have more than one complaint and the variety of diagnosis is wide. Most patients with hearing loss have tinnitus, patients with otorrhoea can have otalgia, but also experience dizziness and/or itch. The patient perspective is a subjective outcome and does not necessarily correlate with other clinical outcomes. For examples, audiometric results vs. perceived hearing disability. This is explained by the fact that the impact of disease is not only the direct result of symptoms, but it also can be heavily affected by accompanying personal cognitive and emotional and environmental factors.1 It can be challenging for the clinician to choose which PROM to use in daily practise. Questionnaire selection is often guided by prior experiences, or by copying from the work of peers and the most suitable questionnaire for the patient in its specific situation is not always selected.2 The objective of this study is to identify and systematically assess all validated closedended multiple complaint questionnaires in the literature and published in the English language for adults covering more than one ear complaints. By doing so, the secondary objective is to create an comprehensive overview of questionnaires and their clinimetric assessment. This review will give a valuable addition to the current literature and will facilitate the selection of questionnaires by caregivers.
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