Surgical Research ReviewWhat does it really mean to “recover” from an operation?
Section snippets
What does postoperative recovery mean?
Postoperative recovery is a complex and multidimensional process that involves multiple domains, including physical, physiologic, psychologic, social, and economic aspects. A comprehensive definition of recovery after surgery has been described by Allvin et al,4 who identified the five defining attributes of recovery after surgery as: (1) an energy-requiring process; (2) a return to a state of normality and wholeness defined by comparative standards; (3) regaining control over physical,
Refining the definiton of a recovery measure
Carli and Mayo17 developed a causal pathway to evaluate the appropriateness of measures of operative outcomes (Fig 2). In this model, any short- or long-term outcome measure must be biologically related to the intervention and should not be influenced by external factors. These outcomes must also be related to the short-term changes that occur after the operation. We have adopted this causal pathway in an attempt to develop a conceptual model for the construct of postoperative recovery. In
Implications for future research
Therefore, future research on postoperative recovery should first focus on identifying all instruments that are currently used to measure recovery and determine their validity for the context of recovery within specific populations of operative patients. To date, the choice of instruments appears somewhat arbitrary. Although generic instruments such as the SF-36 have been validated across a wide spectrum of diseases, its psychometric properties have yet to be investigated for many specific
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The Steinberg-Bernstein Centre for Minimally Invasive Surgery and Innovation is supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Covidien. L.L. is supported by the Quebec Health Sciences Research Fund (FRQS) and the McGill Surgeon Scientist Program. Neither funding agency was involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of the data and in the writing of the report.