More and more people are surviving emergency, life-threatening illnesses. However, survival often comes at a cost to patients' wellbeing. Many suffer from being so ill in ways not necessarily related to their original illness. Patients struggle with their normal activities of daily living or to do the job they did before. They struggle to live independently, to enjoy a normal diet, or to be pain-free. This leads to a decrease in their quality of life, placing a burden on families. Investigators don't have a good method of highlighting and representing the issues faced by these patients. Investigators have recently implemented a service innovation project, using an an app-based questionnaire in two groups (patients that survive emergency surgery, and those who survive critical illness) to highlight these problems early, so that individuals are offered the right help and services to return to living their lives as fully as possible. Patients will be asked to fill in an electronic (on-line) questionnaire while in hospital, and at 1 and 6 months afterwards. Along side this investigators intend to perform a qualitative assessment of the value and acceptability of this project. Investigators will interview patients approximately 2-3 weeks after the questionnaire completion at 1 and 6 months to determine how easy it was to use, how acceptable the process was and how well it described and highlighted their problems. If this system works, it would become part of routine care, extended to patients admitted as emergencies to hospital, and used to develop a national program for all UK hospital patients
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AI-rewrites the medical criteria so a patient or caregiver can understand them. Always confirm with the trial site.
This is a qualitative study exploring the feasibility and acceptability of the electronic HRQoL
Timeframe: 6 months to one year