New York — Researchers here say they’ve identified six factors that contribute to patient satisfaction with breast surgery outcomes, reports Medical News Today.
A research team led by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Andrea Pusic, M.D., interviewed 48 women who had undergone either breast reduction, augmentation or reconstruction procedures. The results of their study appeared in the open-access journal BMC Women’s Health, where Dr. Pusic writes, “Patient satisfaction with breast appearance was without doubt the key theme and is a salient factor in determining the success of breast surgery. However, other themes were also identified that related to the broadened notion of quality of life, including concepts such as physical, psychological and sexual wellbeing.”
The authors found that women’s concerns about breast conditions and breast surgery lay in six areas: satisfaction with breasts; satisfaction with overall outcome; psychosocial wellbeing; sexual wellbeing; physical wellbeing; and satisfaction with the process of care. These themes were common to women in all three surgical groups, though the importance ascribed to each varied by group. Physical wellbeing, for example, was of limited importance to breast augmentation patients, but was frequently the main motivation behind breast reduction surgery and an issue for women who had undergone breast reconstruction.
Dr. Pusic and her colleagues have used the results of their research to develop a new patient-reported outcome measure called the BREAST-Q©, which consists of three procedure-specific modules: augmentation, reconstruction and reduction. “The combination of extensive detailed qualitative research and modern psychometric methods make it possible to measure constructs, such as patient satisfaction, in a more clinically meaningful and scientifically robust way than has ever been done in this patient group,” the authors write.
