Information about complications as decision supporting information for patients.

From society there is increasing pressure to get more information on the
quality of care that patients receive, and possible differences in this care
between hospitals. However, international research has shown that patients do
not trust, understand and do not use this kind of information for their
decision making.
The number of specialties using a complicationregistration is one of the
present performance indicators used by the Health Care Inspectorate to assess
the quality of care of hospitals. The question is whether and how information
about complications is suitable to give patients reliable and useful
information about complications (and possible differences between hospitals).
Possible problems may be the validaty of the outcome measures due to
differences in patientmix, proceduremix, and quality of registration.

The objective of this study is to assess whether patients regard complication
information as important and use complication information when choosing a
hospital, related to other factors such as distance and waiting time.
Related to this objective it is the wuestion whether it is possible to extract
complication information from the complication registration of the three
participating hospitals that is: a. reliable, b. gives an impression of the
quality of care, and c. is useful for a patient (with a certain condition) to
choose a hospital where they will be treated for their condition.

The information about complications will be used to develop outcome measures
which are both useful and understandable for patients, in cooperation with
representatives of patient organisations and surgeons. The prerequisite is that
these should concern a specific patient group or treatment, the outcome should
be verified using objective information, and be an indicator of the quality of
care. A questionnaire will be sent to patients who underwent one out of the
five selected surgical operations in 2005, to assess whether patients regard
information about complications as important in the process of choosing a
hospital or treatment and how this relates to other factors. Through a discrete
choice study design the relative importance of complication information on
patient choices will be determined.

Filling out the questionnaire (research question 2) will take 30 minutes
maximally. When patients decide that they want to receive the questionnaire to
take part in the discrete choice study (research question 2) this will take
another 30 minutes. Since not filling out the first questionnaire (or not
willing to receive the second questionnaire) will not have any consequences,
the impact for the patient will be minimal.