Wales’ participation in the OECD PaRIS survey: exploring the logistics of a large-scale patient-reported outcome survey

Background The Organisation for the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) undertook the Patient-Reported Indicator Survey (PaRIS) to understand if current healthcare delivery and policy were meeting people’s needs. Although the UK as a whole is an OECD member, Wales participated in the PaRIS study independently of the rest of the UK since healthcare is a devolved matter to the Welsh Government and Wales is internationally acknowledged for its work implementing Patient Reported Outcome Measures. Methods Here we describe and reflect how PaRIS was implemented, discussing both the initial field trial and the final survey, which targeted GP practices and patients over the age of 45. We detail the governance structure used for the project, the various parties that cooperated to implement the project and the stakeholder engagement approach utilised. We also provide descriptive statistics of the sampled GP practices and patients. Results Out of 199 surveyed GP practices, 75 responded to the survey. Out of 109,600 sampled patients, 25,839 responded to the survey, out of which 7,706 patients were from the 75 recruited practices and met the PaRIS inclusion criteria. Participants were representative of the population of Wales with respect to urbanisation levels, sex, as well as ethnicity. GP practices were provided with infographics, giving them insight into their patients’ health compared to patients’ health across Wales. While the OECD flagship PaRIS report has now been published, further work is being undertaken in Wales to utilise the available data. Conclusion Wales achieved one of the most comprehensive datasets of all PaRIS nations, despite its small size. The data offered the participating GP practices an opportunity to understand how they and their patients compared to other practices across Wales. The data is now being employed to understand population health and drive policy change and healthcare improvement initiatives across the nation.