Health Questionnaires

Your mental health team are introducing a new way to help you describe how you are feeling and to work out what we can do together to help improve areas of your life that you may be finding difficult. We are going to do this by introducing patient health questionnaires also known as Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs). The questionnaires ask about your health and wellbeing from your point of view.

 

How will health questionnaires help me?

Thousands of people have participated in research and said that they found patient health questionnaires really helped them. The questionnaires help you describe how you are feeling, explore what you would like to be different and to work out what we can do together to help improve areas of your life that are affecting your health and wellbeing.

 

What will I be asked?

The questionnaire we will be using is called DIALOG. This questionnaire has 11 questions. The first 8 questions cover different areas of your life, and the last 3 are about your treatment. You will be asked to choose a number from 1 to 7 that best matches how you feel in these areas, with 7 being totally satisfied and 1 being totally dissatisfied.

The questionnaire is designed to structure a conversation (dialog) with your health professional where you can talk about your answers in more detail. Dialog is a personal measure to you. Two people giving the same number for the same question might mean two completely different things, so there are no wrong answers. If there is a question you find difficult to rate, you may leave it blank and discuss this with your health professional at your appointment.

 

How often will I be asked to complete these questionnaires?

You will be asked to fill in the Dialog questionnaire at the beginning of your care as this will give you a really good idea of where you are starting from in terms of your health and wellbeing.

We will talk to you about your answers to help guide your care and treatment options.

By filling them in again regularly throughout your treatment this helps to build up a picture of your care. Positive change is an achievement and can give you confidence, but we don’t expect to see constant improvement all the time. If your scores don’t change or become lower, we can use this as a starting point to make changes to your care and treatment.

 

How can I complete these questionnaires?

There are a variety of ways that you could complete a patient questionnaire:

• Text message
• Online forms
• You can take the questionnaire home and fill it in and bring it back to your next appointment
• If you are unable to receive or respond to questionnaires using the options above, it is ok to ask your health professional to help you fill in the questionnaire as part of your next appointment.

 

What if I have any worries or more questions about taking part?

If you have any worries or concerns talk to your health professional and they will be happy to discuss and explain the questions in more detail.

 

Who will see my answers?

Only the people who treat you will see how you answer the questionnaire. Anonymised scores may be combined to assess the service. However, people assessing the scores will not know who has filled in the questionnaires.

 

How patient questionnaires help us to improve our services

• Help to identify where something works for someone or a group of people and where it doesn’t
• Making outcomes measure data publicly available enables a culture of transparency and openness about the impacts of treatment
• Can be used to support improvement within services.