Anesthesia & Clinical Research
Open Access

Abstract

Development and Validation of the Post-Operative Recovery Index for Measuring Quality of Recovery after Surgery

Stephen F. Butler, Ryan A. Black, Lee Techner, Kathrine C. Fernandez, David Brooks, Mollie Wood and Nathaniel Katz

Purpose: Current methods used to quantify aspects of recovery after surgery and anesthesia tend to be narrowly focused, not patient-rated, or have not been appropriately validated. We set out to develop a quality of recovery score system that is self-report and multi-dimensional, with applicability across various surgeries and surgical settings, from immediately post-surgery through discharge and covering the first 30 days of recovery. Methods: A Post-operative Recovery Index (PoRI) was validated on 225 patients (NValidation=96; NCross Validation=129) who had undergone a surgical procedure within the last 30 days. Domain level internal consistency on the validation and cross validation samples yielded coefficients ranging from α=0.813 to α=0.932, while test-retest reliability yielded stability coefficients ranging from r=0.660 to r=0.881.