Patient-Reported Outcome Measures in Foot and Ankle Health
Summary
Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) have become indispensable tools for assessing symptoms, functional limitations and quality of life in individuals with foot and ankle conditions. These structured questionnaires capture the patient’s perspective on pain, mobility, social participation and satisfaction following non-surgical management, surgery or rehabilitation. Instruments vary in scope from generic health-status tools to region-specific scales, each subjected to rigorous psychometric evaluation. Key developments include the consolidation of domain-specific items into single summary indices, refinement of cross-cultural adaptations and the integration of electronic platforms to facilitate real-time monitoring. By standardising outcome reporting, PROMs support comparative effectiveness research, inform clinical decision-making and guide resource allocation in orthopaedics and rehabilitation worldwide.
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Patient-Reported Outcome Measures in Foot and Ankle Health publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in patient-reported outcome measures in foot and ankle health across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Patient-Reported Outcome Measure (PROM): A standardised questionnaire completed by patients to assess health status, symptoms or quality of life without interpretation by clinicians.
Internal Consistency: A measure of how well items within a single instrument or subscale correlate with each other, often quantified by Cronbach’s alpha.
Construct Validity: The extent to which an instrument measures the theoretical trait or domain it purports to assess, often evaluated through correlation with related measures.
Responsiveness: The ability of an instrument to detect clinically meaningful changes in a patient’s status over time.
Summary Index Score: A single composite score derived from multiple domains of a PROM, intended to simplify interpretation and reduce statistical comparisons.
References
- The Manchester–Oxford Foot Questionnaire (MOXFQ) Development and validation of a summary index score. Bone and Joint Research (2013).
- Reliability, validity and responsiveness of the German self-reported foot and ankle score (SEFAS) in patients with foot or ankle surgery. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders (2017).
- Reliability and validity of the Dutch version of the foot and ankle outcome score (FAOS). BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders (2013).
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