Support The Development Of Symptom Evaluation Tools

Did you know there has never been a validated method to allow clinicians to document patient UTI symptoms as part of an accurate diagnosis? With the development of a tool to fully assess patient experiences, the complete impact of UTI can be considered and treatment approaches personalized.

By partnering with universities in the US and UK, we’ve successfully developed and validated two tools specifically for this purpose, called patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Now, we need your support to prove their effectiveness in a clinical setting and get them into the hands of clinicians. 

This project is partially funded through a Graduate Teaching Assistantship at the University of Reading. The University of Reading has also offered financial support towards open access publishing charges. The rest of the work is currently only possible with community support. By contributing to the community support goal, you’ll be helping to continue this critical work.

Your Support Will Enable Us To:

• Establish our new PROMs as high quality clinical tools that support recurrent UTI treatment and management.
• Conduct clinical research using the PROMs before and after antibiotic treatment to obtain the data needed to establish their effectiveness in a clinical setting.
• Conduct important survey-based research to better understand the possible links between patient UTI symptoms and the patient experience of living with a chronic condition.

What We’ve Already Achieved

• As part of a rigorous three-stage methodology to develop and validate the PROMs, we: 

• Collaborated with an international sample of 15 highly experienced rUTI clinicians to develop an initial set of questionnaire items, capturing the broad patient experience of rUTI symptoms and impact.

• Conducted qualitative interview research with a diverse sample of 28 recurrent UTI patients in 10 countries. 

• Conducted a pilot study of the new PROMs with 240 recurrent UTI patients residing in 28 countries. 

• We have prepared research articles which report on our work so far, and have started the process of submitting these to academic peer-reviewed journals for publication. As the PROMs become more widely accessible through publication, they will be adopted in further research and in clinical settings.

Campaign Updates

June 2022

• We’re excited to announce that we have submitted our first research article for publication, around our work on the PROMs. Watch this space for more news!

September 2022

• We are actively recruiting patients to complete two surveys to further assess their use in clinical settings. You can help us move forward this important work by completing these surveys. Click here to participate.