Continence Postcards versus Urinary Pad Logs: Simple Methods to Measure Early Pad-Free Urinary Continence after...

We evaluated whether a simple postcard reporting the date of becoming pad-free is accurate compared to a daily log of pad use to determine time to pad-free status after robot-assisted radical prostatectomy.

Prospectively at the time of discharge home we gave 439 men treated with robot-assisted radical prostatectomy between April 2010 and September 2014 a self-addressed stamped postcard to mark the date they attained pad-free urinary continence. In addition, we concurrently asked the men to fill out a daily urinary log of pad use to be faxed or emailed.

Of the 439 men 193 (44%) reported their pad-free status via postcard and pad use log. The correlation of time to pad-free status via postcard compared to daily log was R² = 0.98 (p <0.0001). Overall of the 439 men 292 (66%) returned a postcard and 309 men (70.4%) returned a urinary log. However, only 239 (54.4%) of the logs contained the date of pad-free status and, thus, the continence cards were more likely to report pad status correctly (p <0.001). In addition to the 66.5% continence card rate 7.7% of the logs provided additional pad-free dates, resulting in a combined pad-free return rate of 74.3%.

Patient reported continence postcards or pad use logs are a simple, inexpensive and reliable way to determine pad-free continence after radical prostatectomy. Either method offers surgeons a low cost, dependable and easy way to track pad-free continence outcomes and their combined use resulted in a nearly 75% response rate.