PRMs Collaborative Conversation Series - Dr Tim Schultz

Dr Tim Schultz

Dr Tim Schultz
Senior Research Fellow

Affil­i­a­tion: Flinders University

Tim is a health ser­vices researcher at Flinders Health and Med­ical Research Insti­tute work­ing on the design, imple­men­ta­tion and eval­u­a­tion of new mod­els of care.

Q&A with Tim

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

“PROMs seem to offer a lot of poten­tial to inform improve­ment activ­i­ties in health care, but real­is­ing gains through get­ting PRMs embed­ded into prac­tice to inform clin­i­cal deci­sion mak­ing is a sig­nif­i­cant hur­dle. Addi­tion­al­ly, I’m inter­est­ed in how PRMs can be used specif­i­cal­ly in elec­tive surgery, and how PROs and oth­er clin­i­cal out­come mea­sures can be used to esti­mate qual­i­ty of care, in light of mea­sur­ing val­ue as quality/​costs.”

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

“I first used PRMs in eval­u­a­tions and clin­i­cal tri­als with­out real­ly appre­ci­at­ing what they were, and their util­i­ty in pro­vid­ing the patient per­spec­tive with­out fil­ter­ing through clin­i­cians’ or researchers’ per­spec­tives. Since, then I have start­ed a project seek­ing to bet­ter under­stand how PROs can be used to inform qual­i­ty and val­ue in elec­tive surgery.”

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?

“As an aca­d­e­m­ic researcher it can be dif­fi­cult to engage with patients, espe­cial­ly if a study is ret­ro­spec­tive­ly review­ing care pro­vid­ed in a hos­pi­tal to a dis­parate group of patients. How­ev­er, we are start­ing to work more close­ly with con­sumer rep­re­sen­ta­tives embed­ded in the Uni­ver­si­ty or local health net­works, which is bring­ing clear improve­ments to how we go about our research.”

Con­tact Tim

View oth­er pro­files in the PRMs Col­lab­o­ra­tive Con­ver­sa­tion Series.