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Defining treatment success in children with surgical conditions
  1. Oliver Rivero-Arias1,2,
  2. John Buckell2,
  3. Marian Knight1,
  4. B M Craig3,
  5. Rema Ramakrishnan1,
  6. Simon Kenny4,
  7. Benjamin Allin1,5
  8. on behalf of the CSOR Collaborative Group
    1. 1 Nuffield Department of Population Health, National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (NPEU), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
    2. 2 Nuffield Department of Population Health, Health Economics Research Centre (HERC), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
    3. 3 Department of Economics, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA
    4. 4 Department of Paediatric Surgery, Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, UK
    5. 5 Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, UK
    1. Correspondence to Dr Oliver Rivero-Arias, Nuffield Department of Population Health, National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (NPEU), University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF, UK; oliver.rivero{at}npeu.ox.ac.uk

    Abstract

    Objectives Develop a score summarising how successfully a child with any surgical condition has been treated, and test the clinical validity of the score.

    Design Discrete choice experiment (DCE), and secondary analysis of data from six UK-wide prospective cohort studies.

    Participants 253 people with lived experience of childhood surgical conditions, 114 health professionals caring for children with surgical conditions and 753 members of the general population completed the DCE. Data from 1383 children with surgical conditions were used in the secondary analysis.

    Main outcome measures Normalised importance value of attribute (NIVA) for number/type of operations, hospital-treated infections, quality of life and duration of survival (reference attribute).

    Results Quality of life and duration of survival were the most important attributes in deciding whether a child had been successfully treated. Parents, carers and previously treated adults placed equal weight on both attributes (NIVA=0.996; 0.798 to 1.194). Healthcare professionals placed more weight on quality of life (NIVA=1.469; 0.950 to 1.987). The general population placed more weight on survival (NIVA=0.823; 95% CI 0.708 to 0.938). The resulting score (the Children’s Surgery Outcome Reporting (CSOR) Treatment Success Score (TSS)) has the best possible value of 1, a value of 0 describes palliation and values less than 0 describe outcomes worse than palliation. CSOR TSSs varied clinically appropriately for infants whose data were included in the UK-wide cohort studies.

    Conclusions The CSOR TSS summarises how successfully children with surgical conditions have been treated, and can therefore be used to compare hospitals’ observed and expected outcomes.

    • health care economics and organizations
    • health services research
    • paediatrics

    Data availability statement

    Data are available upon reasonable request.

    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

    This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

    https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2023-326156

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      WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ON THIS TOPIC

      • Unwarranted variation between hospitals in England and Scotland exists in the management and outcomes of children undergoing specialised surgery.

      • Improving outcomes for children with surgical conditions requires an understanding of whether hospitals’ observed outcomes differ to their expected outcomes.

      • To determine differences between hospitals’ observed and expected outcomes, it is necessary to combine data from children with a broad range of surgical conditions.

      WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS

      • Quality of life and duration of survival are the most important determinants of how successfully a child with a surgical condition has been treated.

      • The number and type of operations and the number of times children have been treated in hospital for an infection contribute significantly less to determining treatment success.

      • This study has developed a score of the success of treatment (Children’s Surgery Outcome Reporting (CSOR) Treatment Success Score (TSS)).

      HOW THIS STUDY MIGHT AFFECT RESEARCH, PRACTICE OR POLICY

      • The CSOR TSS can now be used to determine whether hospitals’ observed outcomes for children with surgical conditions differ to their expected outcomes.

      • This information can be used by hospitals to help understand how their management strategies may be influencing their outcomes.

      Introduction

      Approximately half a million children undergo an operation each year in the UK.1 The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcomes and Death report into the organisational and clinical aspects of children’s surgery,1 the Getting It Right First Time report2 and 15 years of the UK-wide BAPS-CASS cohort studies3–16 have provided evidence that unwarranted variation between hospitals exists in the management and outcomes of children undergoing specialised surgery.

      Reducing unwarranted variation requires understanding whether hospitals’ observed and expected outcomes differ, and by extension, whether management strategies used in individual hospitals are delivering the best possible care for children. The low incidence of childhood surgical conditions complicates the analysis of observed versus expected outcomes when conditions are studied in isolation. Combining data across a range of conditions can enable reliable comparisons. To meaningfully combine data across multiple surgical conditions of childhood, an outcome measure that describes how successfully a child with a surgical condition has been treated is required. Such an outcome measure has not previously been developed.

      The overall objective of this study was therefore to understand how to combine, into a single summary measure describing treatment success, key attributes of the outcome of a child with a surgical condition. A secondary objective was to demonstrate the implementation of this summary measure using existing observational data. This study was conducted as part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded Children’s Surgery Outcome Reporting (CSOR) Programme.

      Methods

      Discrete choice experiment study summary

      Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are commonly used to determine participants’ preferences for treatment options and health states.17 Within a DCE, different ‘attributes’ (eg, ‘quality of life’) are used to describe ‘scenarios’ (eg, ‘treatment A’ or ‘treatment B’), and participants are asked to trade off between (usually) pairs of these scenarios in a series of ‘tasks’. The participants’ responses to DCE tasks can be used to determine the relative value they put on the attributes described in the scenarios.

      To develop a summary measure describing how successful the treatment of a child with a surgical condition has been, a DCE was conducted in which participants responded to 10 tasks. Each scenario used seven attributes to describe a child’s health and well-being following treatment for a surgical condition (table 1 and online supplemental figure 1). Participants were asked to select the scenario in each task that they felt described the more successful treatment. The analysis of participants’ choices gave the ‘value’ (i.e., contribution) of each attribute to the measure of treatment success. These values were used to generate a single score which describes how successful a child’s treatment had been. The DCE is summarised below, with extended details in the published protocol.18

      View this table:
      Table 1

      Study descriptive framework with final list of attributes and attribute levels

      Identification of the attributes to describe treatment success (the descriptive system)

      Attributes and levels were identified by:

      1. Reviewing core outcome sets relevant to paediatric surgery.

      2. Semistructured group discussions.

      3. Think-aloud exercises with parents of children with a surgical condition.

      Further details are provided in the online supplemental materials.

      Experimental design

      The experimental design (the process of selecting the pairs of scenarios (tasks) to present participants in the DCE) was D-efficient and included 45 choice tasks (online supplemental figure 2).19 Participants completed nine choice tasks and an additional palliative choice task. The latter included one scenario describing the outcome of a child’s treatment, and one describing a child being palliated. In the ‘palliative’ scenario, the child underwent no operations, had no infections, had a fair quality of life and survived for 1 month. Further details are provided in the online supplemental materials.

      Survey instrument and recruitment

      The survey started with a welcome, three screening questions, the study aims and descriptions of the DCE’s attributes. Participants could watch short videos explaining the study and attributes as an alternative to reading the text descriptions. To aid familiarisation, participants completed short warm-up tasks and a practice choice task prior to completing the 10 study choice tasks. Only participants 18 years and over were eligible to participate.

      Three groups of stakeholders were sampled:

      1. Parents of children with a surgical condition and people who had been treated for a surgical condition as a child.

      2. Healthcare professionals caring for children with surgical conditions.

      3. Members of the general population.

      A pilot study with stakeholders from groups 1 and 2 was conducted in August 2021, with main data collection between October 2021 and April 2022.

      Data analysis

      Discrete choice modelling

      Responses to the choice tasks were summarised using choice probabilities. Experimental choices were modelled using mixed multinomial logit models (see technical details in the online supplemental material). All attributes were included using dummies in the model specification with constraints for inconsistent attribute levels. An additional term was introduced in the model to capture the value of the palliative scenario that was used to estimate the model for the final algorithm.

      Normalised importance value of attributes

      Normalised importance value of attributes (NIVAs) express the importance that participants place on one attribute relative to another prespecified attribute. NIVAs were estimated using survival as the reference.20 An NIVA of 1 suggests that two attributes are equally important, while NIVAs less than 1 suggest that the comparison attribute is less important than survival and NIVAs greater than 1 suggest the comparison attribute is more important than survival. CIs for NIVAs were estimated using the delta method with pvalues of <0.05 considered statistically significant. NIVAs were calculated separately for each stakeholder group.

      Development of the CSOR Treatment Success Score

      A multistakeholder online focus group was convened to determine which stakeholder group preferences to use in the CSOR Treatment Success Score (TSS). The final selected stakeholder preferences were used to estimate a set of coefficients placed on a ‘palliative space scale’. Placement on the palliative space scale creates a score in which a value of 1 represents the best possible set of outcomes (no operations, no infections, good quality of life and survival more than 20 years), a score of 0 represents a scenario considered a close approximation of palliation (no operations, no infection, fair quality of life and survival less than a month) and scores below 0 represent outcomes considered to be worse than palliation. Further details are provided in the online supplemental materials.

      Application of the CSOR TSS to existing data

      Data from six UK-wide cohort studies describing the management and outcomes of children with Hirschsprung’s disease, gastroschisis, necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), posterior urethral valve (PUV), congenital diaphragmatic hernia and oesophageal atresia were combined into a single dataset. In the original cohorts, data were collected at birth, 28 days of age and 1 year of age for all conditions. For children with Hirschsprung’s disease and gastroschisis, quality of life data were also collected at primary school age (5–8 years of age). To calculate the CSOR TSS at 1 year of age, quality of life was simulated for all infants through random allocation to good, fair or poor quality of life in the same proportions as was seen in the subset of infants with QoL data at 5–8 years of age. These data were used to calculate:

      1. CSOR TSS (including simulated quality of life) at 1 year of age.

      2. Partial CSOR TSS (excluding quality of life) at 1 year of age.

      3. CSOR TSS at 5–8 years of age using data only for those infants in whom quality of life data were available.

      All calculated CSOR TSSs were described according to key infant characteristics, including primary diagnosis, gestational age at birth, birth weight, ethnicity, sex, presence of an additional major congenital anomaly and maternal age.

      Patient and public involvement

      The CSOR Programme has established a Parent Advisory Group (PAG) consisting of over 100 parents and families of children who have undergone early surgery for conditions including Hirschsprung’s disease, gastroschisis, exomphalos, short bowel and NEC. The PAG was pivotal during the study design and the interpretation of results of the DCE. They were actively involved from the point of study conception, through identification of attributes and levels, design of the study instrument including refinement of language and presentation, and through to interpretation and explanation of the results.

      Results

      Respondents

      Table 2 and online supplemental table 1 describe the characteristics of the 1120 people completing the DCE.

      View this table:
      Table 2

      Characteristics of the study participants included in each stakeholder group

      Stakeholder preferences

      Choice probabilities for each choice task provided a preliminary indication that quality of life and survival were the most important attributes in deciding whether a child had been successfully treated (online supplemental table 2). This was corroborated across all stakeholder groups in the modelling exercise (figure 1 and online supplemental table 3). Parents, carers and previously treated adults placed equal weight on quality of life and survival (NIVA=0.996; 0.798 to 1.194). Healthcare professionals placed more weight on quality of life than survival (NIVA=1.469; 0.950 to 1.987) (figure 1). The general population placed less weight on quality of life than survival (NIVA=0.823; 95% CI 0.708 to 0.938). Emergency operations and infections had some bearing on how successfully a child was considered to have been treated, but this influence was considerably less than that of quality of life and survival. Planned operations had a negligible impact on how successful a child’s treatment was considered to be. These results were similar across all stakeholder groups (figure 1). See online supplemental table 3 for the coefficients of the mixed multinomial logit model from which the NIVAs were derived.

      Figure 1
      Figure 1

      Normalised importance value of attribute with associated 95% CIs presented for each stakeholder group separately and combined for parent/people treated and healthcare professionals. Survival attribute is the reference.

      Combining preferences across stakeholder groups

      The focus group felt that there were clear differences in the DCE-estimated preferences between the stakeholder groups, particularly around the value placed on quality of life. They agreed that as the CSOR TSS will be used to compare hospitals’ observed with expected outcomes, the preferences of those with direct experience of healthcare in these settings should be used for development of the CSOR TSS over and above the preferences of those who could potentially experience healthcare in these settings in the future. The preferences of the general population were therefore not used in development of the final CSOR TSS algorithm.

      CSOR Treatment Success Score

      Based on the Palliative Space Scale model (online supplemental table 3), reduced quality of life and duration of survival were associated with large utility decrements, and therefore both of these attributes significantly impact the CSOR TSS. Figure 2 describes the utility decrements for each attribute. The overall CSOR TSS for a given scenario is calculated by summing the utility decrements associated with the attribute levels described in that scenario and subtracting them from 1. See online supplemental figure 3 for examples.

      Figure 2
      Figure 2

      Children’s Surgery Outcome Reporting Treatment Success Score and impact of number/type of operations, hospital-treated infections, quality of life and survival.

      Application of the CSOR TSS

      The mean CSOR TSS (including simulated quality of life) at 1 year of age varied across conditions, ranging from 0.53 (SD 0.44) in children with NEC, to 0.75 (SD 0.27) in children with PUV. The CSOR TSS also varied in a clinically expected way across gestational age at birth, birth weight, maternal age, ethnicity, and according to the presence or absence of additional congenital anomalies (table 3). When CSOR TSSs (including real quality of life data) were described at 5–8 years of age for children with Hirschsprung’s disease and gastroschisis, and when partial CSOR TSSs (excluding quality of life) were described at 1 year of age for all children in the cohort, similar patterns of clinically expected variation in scores across characteristics were observed (online supplemental tables 4 and 5).

      View this table:
      Table 3

      Mean CSOR TSS at 1 year of age by characteristics of infants (calculated using simulated quality of life with population with same proportion as BAPS-CASS data (11% poor, 38% fair, 51% good))

      Discussion

      Summary of key findings

      This study developed a summary measure describing how successfully a child with a surgical condition has been treated (the CSOR TSS). The CSOR TSS is based on the child’s duration of survival and quality of life, which were the most important determinants of treatment success, as well as the number and type of operations the child has undergone, and the number of times they have been treated in hospitals for an infection related to their surgical condition.

      Strengths and weaknesses

      The key strength of this study is its substantial use of personal, parent and healthcare professional experiences channelled through well-established elicitation techniques and statistical modelling. Over 11,000 pairwise comparisons were conducted in the DCE to understand the relative importance of the attributes to different stakeholder groups. The DCE results were reviewed with parents and healthcare professionals to ensure that there was a coherent clinical logic to them and that they reflected real-world experiences. We combined the DCE results with data from six separate observational studies providing CSOR TSSs across multiple surgical conditions. The subsequent testing of the CSOR TSS demonstrated that it appropriately discriminates children whose outcomes are expected to be worse.

      Only 114 healthcare professionals completed the DCE survey, and it is therefore possible that the results do not fully reflect the views of healthcare professionals. Due to the dominance of quality of life and survival over the other attributes, the experimental design did not allow estimation of coefficients for some levels of the operation and hospital-treated infection attributes. It is clear from the results, however, that these attributes were only minor drivers of treatment success and this limitation is therefore unlikely to have biased the results.

      The CSOR TSS is intended to be used to describe treatment success for ‘a child with a surgical condition’. Consequently, the descriptive system focused on outcomes that are important across a range of different styles of surgical condition and we believe that the resulting measure of treatment success is also likely to be relevant across a broader range of surgical conditions. Despite this, the validation of the TSS has only taken place on a small subset of neonatal surgical conditions, as these are the low case number, high-complexity conditions where the use of the TSS will be most beneficial, and for which the most reliable data are currently available. Further studies will be required to validate if the TSS is also applicable to other areas of paediatric surgery, particularly paediatric oncology where there is a combined medical-surgical approach, and in which the contribution of surgery to outcome may be harder to discern. In addition, this approach is less likely to be as beneficial in low-complexity high-volume paediatric surgical practice where it may be feasible to use other quantitative analyses to detect unwarranted variation between hospitals in management and outcome.

      Comparison with previous literature

      We are not aware of any other example in which a DCE has been used to develop an algorithm for determining how successfully people have been treated. Success of surgical treatment is more commonly determined by crude metrics including readmission to hospital, length of stay and operative time.21 22 Condition-specific outcomes such as faecal incontinence for children with Hirschsprung’s disease or stricture formation for children with oesophageal atresia have also previously been used as determinants of success.21 23–27 However, such metrics and specific outcomes are not ideal for determining how successfully an individual with any surgical condition has been treated. Many of the crude metrics have been shown repeatedly to be unimportant in determining treatment success28–33 while the condition-specific outcomes will only ever be relevant to a subset of infants, and when used on their own may give an incomplete picture of the outcome of the child’s treatment.

      Implications and conclusions

      The NIHR-funded CSOR Programme is running over 5 years with an aim of understanding whether it is possible to identify and reduce unwarranted variation in management and outcome of children treated for surgical conditions in 10 pilot hospitals across England and Scotland. Development of the CSOR TSS has made it possible to meaningfully combine outcomes data for children with a range of surgical conditions, and therefore determine whether outcomes in these 10 pilot hospitals are better or worse than would be expected based on the case-mix of children they have treated. This information is essential for identifying and reducing unwarranted variation in management and outcome.

      Data availability statement

      Data are available upon reasonable request.

      Ethics statements

      Patient consent for publication

      Ethics approval

      This study involves human participants and ethics approval to conduct this study was obtained from the Medical Sciences Inter-Divisional Research Ethics Committee (IDREC) at the University of Oxford (R59631/RE001-05). Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

      Acknowledgments

      We are grateful to our Parental Advisory Group and the paediatric surgeons for their valuable contributions and help with the descriptive system. We would like to thank the participants of our think-aloud exercise, whose suggestions refined the final descriptive system and improved the online survey instrument.

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      Supplementary materials

      • Supplementary Data

        This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.

      Footnotes

      • X @Marianfknight, @simonkenny14

      • OR-A and JB contributed equally.

      • Collaborators CSOR Collaborative Group: Benjamin Allin (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford, and Great Ormond Street Hospital), Goher Ayman (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford), Timothy Bradnock (Royal Hospital for Children, Glasgow), Kirsty Brennan (Evelina Children’s Hospital), John Buckell (Health Economics Research Centre, University of Oxford), Stefano Giuliani (Great Ormond Street Hospital), Claudia Grimaldo-Giraldo (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford), Nigel J Hall (Southampton Children’s Hospital and University of Southampton), Lisa Hinton (Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford), Crispin Jenkinson (Health Services Research Unit, University of Oxford), Ingo Jester (Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital), Simon Kenny (Alder Hey Children's Hospital NHS Foundation Trust), Marian Knight (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford), Karolina Kuberska (The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute, University of Cambridge), Kokila Lakhoo (Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, University of Oxford), Nick Lansdale (Royal Manchester Children's Hospital), Anna May Long (Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust), Alexander Macdonald (Chelsea & Westminster Hospital), Charles Opondo (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford), Rema Ramakrishnan (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford), Oliver Rivero-Arias (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford), Joanne Shepherd (Patient Representative), Gregor Walker (Royal Hospital for Children, Glasgow).

      • Contributors OR-A, BA, MK and SK developed the original idea for the study and secured funding. OR-A, JB, BMC, BA and MK were responsible for the study design. OR-A, JB and BA conducted the formative research component informing the development of attributes and levels for the descriptive system. JB and BMC carried out the experimental design. OR-A and BMC implemented the online survey instrument. JB and OR-A conducted the statistical analysis of the DCE data and developed the CSOR Treatment Success Score with contributions from BMC. RR conducted the statistical analysis of the case study with contributions from BA. OR-A, BA and JB drafted the manuscript; all authors revised and approved the final manuscript. All members of the CSOR Collaborative Group participated in the overall programme design, the development and testing of the survey instrument and the interpretation of study results. OR-A acts as the guarantor.

      • Funding This study is funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research Programme (project reference NIHR 127844). MK is an NIHR Senior Investigator.

      • Disclaimer The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

      • Competing interests All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at http://www.icmje.org/disclosure-of-interest/ and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

      • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

      • Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

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