Home health monitoring around the time of surgery: qualitative study of patients’ experiences before and after joint replacement

Sabrina Grant*, Ashley W. Blom, Ian Craddock, Michael Whitehouse, Rachael Gooberman-Hill

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)
82 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract


Objectives: Hip and knee replacements are common major elective surgical interventions with over 200,000 performed annually in the UK. Not all patients achieve optimal outcomes or experience problems or delays in recovery. The number of patients needing these operations are set to increase and routine clinical monitoring is time and resource consuming for patients and healthcare providers, therefore innovative evaluation of surgical outcomes are needed. The aim of this qualitative study was to capture the patient experience of living with a novel home monitoring sensing system during the period around joint replacement.

Setting: One secondary care hospital in the South West, UK

Participants: 13 patients, (8 female, 63-89y) undergoing total hip or knee replacement enrolled into the study

Design: Qualitative study with thematic analysis. The system remained in situ for up to 12 weeks after their surgery and comprised a group of low powered sensors monitoring the environment (temperature, light and humidity) and activity of people within the home. Patients were interviewed at two timepoints: before and after surgery. Interviews explored views about living with the technology, its acceptability as well as attitudes towards health technology.

Results: Three main themes emerged: installation of home sensing technology on the journey to surgery; the home space and defining unobtrusiveness and pivotal role of social support networks

Conclusions: Patients who agreed to the technology found living with it acceptable. A home sensing system that monitors the environment and activity of the people in the home could provide an innovative way of assessing patients’ surgical outcomes. At a time, characterised by reduced mobility, functional limitations and increased pain, patients in this study relied on informal and formal supportive networks to help maintain the system through the busy trajectory of the perioperative period.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere032205
Number of pages10
JournalBMJ Open
Volume9
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Dec 2019

Keywords

  • home monitoring
  • hip
  • knee
  • qualitative
  • orthopaedic

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