Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

With a growing emphasis on patient-centred care, policymakers, doctors, and researchers need to better understand patient experience, and how that experience gives rise to patient satisfaction. Gaining a deeper understanding of how system-based and personal factors predict satisfaction, and how it can change over time, will allow the identification of opportunities to improve delivery of care and enhance patient experience. Recognizing that experience and satisfaction are dynamic, this study will explore which factors most influence variation in patient satisfaction trajectories in the year following total knee arthroplasty (TKA). TKA is the most common joint replacement surgery in Canada, yet up to 20% of TKA patients express dissatisfaction with their results, and there is insufficient evidence about which elements of patient experience most influence this assessment. Drawing on existing data from a CIHR/PHSI-funded study exploring patient experience and outcomes with a cohort of 515 TKA patients, this new mixed methods study will undertake quantitative and qualitative analyses of predictors of change in satisfaction with TKA between 6 and 12 months post-surgery. The two analyzes will then be compared to identify areas of agreement and disagreement in the identification of predictors of satisfaction over time. It is anticipated that the complementary findings from this study will suggest areas of TKA service provision that could be refined to improve patient experience and satisfaction. The areas of divergence will identify new predictive factors that can be explored in future research. Given the high volume of this procedure and the relatively high rates of patient dissatisfaction, gaining a more precise understanding of what predicts patient satisfaction over time will identify opportunities to enact more patient-centred care.