Elena is a Senior Health Economics. She holds a PhD in Economics and Management from Padua University, a Master degree in Economics and Management of Health Care Services from Ferrara University and a first degree in Economics from Padua University.
Prior to coming to UCL she was a Research Associate at the Imperial College Business School, working on the economic evaluation of the Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) for Northwest London.
She previously held a research post at the Department of Economics, Ferrara University, where she collaborated to a multi-year research project and undertook an economic evaluation of a Regional Colorectal Cancer Screening Program.
CLAHRC researchers highlight potential to use patient-reported outcomes for emergency admissions.
Patient-reported outcome measures or PROMs are a well-established method of capturing the views of NHS patients, allowing the service to assess the quality of care delivered, from the patient perspective.
PROMs use pre- and post-operative surveys completed by patients to calculate their health gains after surgical treatment.
While there is an extensive PROM programme across the English NHS, they have yet to be used in emergency admissions. These account for nearly 40% of all hospital admissions and are an area of increasing demand. However, this is also an area where the NHS knows least about;
the quality of patient outcomes,
whether resources are being used effectively,
and whether there are unexpected variation between different providers
CLAHRC researcher and PhD Dr Esther Kwong investigated how to use PROMs to evaluate the quality of acute and emergency hospital care in the NHS. Esther developed and tested PROMS with patients who underwent emergency admissions, establishing that it is feasible to use PROMS in this clinical area.
They are presented in four new CLAHRC BITEs – postcard summaries of Esther’s published academic papers.
