PRMs Collaborative Conversation Series - Jessica Roydhouse

Jessica Roydhouse

Jes­si­ca Roy­d­house
Senior Research Fellow

Affil­i­a­tion: ISO­QOL, ISPOR

I am a senior research fel­low focus­ing on health ser­vices research at the Men­zies Insti­tute for Med­ical Research, Uni­ver­si­ty of Tas­ma­nia. As part of this role I am also Direc­tor of the Tas­man­ian Can­cer Registry.

Q&A with Jessica 

What inter­est­ed you about patient report­ed mea­sures research and/​or projects?

I became inter­est­ed in patient-report­ed mea­sures research and projects because it was mean­ing­ful and fun at the same time. I am pri­mar­i­ly a method­olog­i­cal researcher, and with PROM research I feel that my method­olog­i­cal work can trans­late into things that mat­ter to patients and car­ers. There are many method­olog­i­cal chal­lenges to explore and address in PROM research as well.

What is your biggest achieve­ment in rela­tion to patient report­ed mea­sures research, or the appli­ca­tion of research into practice?

One of my major areas of research has been on han­dling data from car­ers when patients can’t com­plete patient-report­ed mea­sures. In 2020, I pub­lished a paper about the lim­i­ta­tions of advanced meth­ods for address­ing this chal­lenge (Roy­d­house, Gut­man, Keat­ing, Mor & Wil­son, Propen­si­ty scores for proxy reports of care expe­ri­ence and qual­i­ty: Are they use­ful? (2020), Health Ser­vices and Out­comes Research Method­ol­o­gy 20:40 – 59). My col­leagues and I recent­ly received fund­ing to try and address this prob­lem. I feel this is one of my biggest achieve­ments as I helped iden­ti­fy the prob­lem and now I can work towards address­ing it.

How do you approach col­lab­o­ra­tion with con­sumers, car­ers and com­mu­ni­ty? Or how do think we can work togeth­er to keep mak­ing advance­ments in this space?

I think col­lab­o­ra­tion with con­sumers and/​or car­ers is an impor­tant aspect of research, par­tic­u­lar­ly PROM research as the goal of using PROMs is to include patient voic­es in care and research. This is pos­si­ble even for method­olog­i­cal research. We have con­sumer and car­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives as advi­sors on the project I men­tioned above. I think researchers should con­sid­er how we can learn from our con­sumer or car­er part­ners and how we can work with and engage them. I feel that consumer/​carer engage­ment has ben­e­fit­ed my projects and helped me think about issues I may not have pre­vi­ous­ly considered.

Con­tact Jessica

View oth­er pro­files in the PRMs Col­lab­o­ra­tive Con­ver­sa­tion Series.