Patient scoring of outcomes for clinical trials that compare treatment options for bloodstream infections: a survey among adult inpatients.

Objectives: Patients' perspectives on outcomes of clinical trials is critical to the design of meaningful trials. As they are the primary recipients of treatment, it is important to focus on outcomes that are of value to the patients. We planned a study involving patients in defining and prioritizing endpoints for intervention trials for bloodstream infections (BSI).

Methods: A survey was conducted at Rambam Health Care Campus, targeting hospitalized patients over 18 years old. Participants were asked to score the importance of various outcomes on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most important. We calculated the mean and median and dispersion measures per outcome.

Results: 732 randomly selected patients were approached; 378 were not available due to technical reasons. Of the remaining 354 approached to take the survey, 300 consented and participated in the study. The median age was 51.9 years, with 55.3% female. Death was scored as the most important outcome, while the length of hospital stay was the least important.

Conclusions: Eliciting patient views on outcome importance was challenging but revealed key insights. Patients prioritized death, functional decline, and the development of secondary infections. Non-clinical outcomes, such as microbiological failure, were less clearly understood. Future studies should focus on clinical outcomes and include larger, more diverse patient populations to enhance the relevance of BSI trials.