More than just morbidity and mortality – quality of recovery and long-term functional recovery after surgery

Traditional surgical outcome measures include minor and major complications, hospital length of stay and sometimes longer-term survival. Each of these is important but there needs to be greater emphasis on patient-reported outcome measures. Global measures of a patient's quality of recovery, avoidance of postoperative morbidities, early hospital discharge to home (without re-admission) and longer term disability-free survival can better define postoperative recovery. A patient's recovery pathway can be mapped through the immediate days or weeks after surgery with documentation of morbidity using the postoperative morbidity survey and/or a quality of recovery score, days alive and at home up to 30 days after surgery and then longer term disability-free survival using the WHO Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 scale. These can be used to define quality of recovery after surgery.