Lower extremity peripheral artery disease is a chronic illness that has a significant effect on the quality of life of the patients in short- as well as long-term.
Generic Instruments, such as widely used Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36 questionnaire (SF-36) might be too insensitive to specific problems and associated comorbidities of vascular surgery patients as well as too complicated for routine use in a busy clinical setting. Therefore, the Vascular Quality of life questionnaire (VascuQoL-25) has been developed for use in the UK in 2001 at the Vascular Surgical Unit of King's College Hospital in London. To further simplify the use of the questionnaire, a lighter Version, that reduced the amount of asked questions from 25 to 6 (VascQuol-6) has been presented and found to be both valid and relevant. VascuQoL- 6 is a disease-specific questionnaire, developed to assess health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with peripheral artery disease. It has been translated to 8 languages including German, and successfully validated for the use to assess in patients with peripheral artery disease in Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Brazil and Poland.
In opinion of the investigators, a unified means to obtain relevant data concerning patient-related outcomes following treatment (endovascular or surgical) for PAD as part of existing aftercare schemes currently lacks in Switzerland. A simple tool such as VascuQoL-6 would allow collecting and objectively assessing, as well as comparing this kind of information after such procedures.
The main objective of the project is to validate the electronic version of the VascuQoL-6 for assessment of patient-related outcomes after a revascularization procedure (either surgical or interventional) for peripheral artery disease in the German-speaking part of Switzerland preoperatively, during the routine 30 days and a one-year follow-up.
Furthermore, upon the successful validation of the electronic VascuQoL-6, the investigators seek to implement the use of this easy to use, straight-forward tool in the follow-up scheme of the Swiss Vascular Registry (SwissVasc).
This project is of Risk A (minimum risk) according to art. 7 (HRO), because the patient-related quality of life will be evaluated after vascular surgery or intervention and will not have an influence on treatment modality.
Hypothesis and primary objective Assessment of quality regarding invasive treatment (endovascular or surgical), outcomes and patients satisfaction becomes a more and more powerful instrument to influence and guide decisions in the Swiss healthcare system. However, no unified means are currently being applied as part of the existing follow-up schema after revascularization for PAD in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Therefore, the possibility to provide, assess, compare and use the information about short- mid- and long-term patient-related outcomes and improved/decreased disease- related quality of life in the decision-making process is limited.
Validation of a comprehensible and easy-to-use electronic Version of the VascuQoL-6 will allow obtaining such information in patients that underwent vascular/ endovascular surgery in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.
SwissVasc (i.e. Adjumed.net) is a nation-wide database to register vascular interventions and associated outcomes. Registration of individual data in SwissVasc (i.e. 30-day mortality, complication rate) is mandatory in Kanton Zurich and will become mandatory in Kanton Basel- Stadt and Basel-Landschaft in 2020. Moreover, this register will soon be part of the statutes of the Swiss Society of Vascular Surgery to evaluate the quality of training in each institution.
The Evaluation of VascuQoL-6 is part of this ambitious project. The goal is to implement the use of this questionnaire into the SwissVasc registry follow-up schema, to provide a uniformly used tool to collect and investigate the above-said information.
