Outcome Monitoring After Cardiac Surgery (OMACS)

Sponsor: University Hospitals Bristol

Status: Recruiting

After cardiac surgery, patients routinely have a follow-up appointment six weeks after discharge. After this appointment the patient is usually referred back to the care of their general practitioner (GP) and no longer receives care from, nor is followed up by, the cardiac surgery team. This means that we have little information about their long term health.  This study will allow long-term data collection after cardiac surgery.

The aim of OMACS is to collect information about the medium and long-term health status of patients who have had cardiac surgery.

We will ask participants to complete a questionnaire relevant to the surgery they have received and / or a quality of life questionnaire at 3 months and 12 months post-operatively.

Participants will be given a choice of participating electronically or via post to maximise the convenience for participants.

We will ask potential participants for consent to use their data collected as part of their clinical care at this hospital (Bristol Royal Infirmary) or at other hospitals using nationally collected data (called Hospital Episode Statistics or HES). Participants can optionally consent to provide blood and urine sample before and shortly after surgery.

This information will be used to help us design future research and answer research questions in ongoing studies.

OMACS also includes some substudies:

1. The first substudy has investigated whether the presentation style and format of the information leaflets provided to potential participants has an effect on the consent rates to the study.  We have used the format that resulted in the highest number of consented patients to use for the remainder of the study, and to design patient information templates for other studies.
2. The second substudy is looking at the wording of cover letters that accompany participant questionnaires, and whether the number of questionnaires returned can be increased by using particular phrases.

You can read the study newsletters here

Contact Information

Chief Investigator: Dr Lucy Culliford, Research Fellow

Study coordinator: Katie Joyce

E-mail:  omacs-study@bristol.ac.uk