Medical and psychosocial evaluation of patients with complications after sinonasal surgery: Creating a questionnaire

BACKGROUND. In our ENT practice, we have encountered situations where we had to evaluate and treat patients complaining of symptoms after a previous surgery. All these patients were capable and entitled to seek for legal advice as much as medical care. We felt the need to record their physical and emotional status and to monitor their evolution in these fields. For this reason, we created a questionnaire to help us not to disregard some important or delicate aspects of their condition. MATERIAL AND METHODS. After evaluating all the existing ENT questionnaires, we decided to create a custom one in order to assess more of the sensitive topics as anger, sadness, regret or frustration. Questions needed to be asked in a certain manner and must be presented in a well-thought order, respecting some basic rules. The evaluation scale needed to be very clear, simple to complete and compare, and identical for all the questions. RESULTS. Creating a questionnaire was a challenging task that led us to an 18-question survey, equally covering symptoms, feelings and quality of life. We used the test only for the patients who presented after a sinonasal surgery and who suggested that their symptoms were caused by the previous intervention. CONCLUSION. A questionnaire is a simple and cheap way to evaluate patients. If the topics needed to be documented are not stated in a classic validated survey, a new evaluation instrument can be created. For patients with complications and sequelae after sinonasal interventions, we designed a new questionnaire that can be used to compare their treatment progression.