Validation of the Polish translation of the Quality of Recovery-15 questionnaire

The evaluation of postoperative convalescence requires a patient-reported quality of recovery. One of the tools that facilitate such evaluation is the Quality of Recovery-15 (QoR-15) questionnaire. Even though it has been validated in several languages, a Polish version of the questionnaire has not been available until now.

The study was conducted in 5 Polish hospitals from 22 January 2023 to 7 May 2023. Patients aged over 18 years undergoing a surgical procedure with planned general anaesthesia were considered eligible for the study. The participants completed the translated QoR-15 questionnaire twice: before surgery and on day 1 after surgery. 20% of patients were asked to complete the questionnaire twice after surgery in order to establish the test-retest reliability. Visual Analogue Scale results were obtained at each time point. Comprehensive data regarding patients' clinical characte-ristics, surgical procedure and postoperative complications were obtained from medical records.

342 patients (52.6% females) successfully completed both preoperative and postoperative questionnaires. The Cronbach's a values for preoperative and postoperative questionnaires were 0.85 and 0.86, respectively. Test-retest reliability indicated by the intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.91 (95% CI: 0.85 to 0.94, P < 0.01). Cohen's effect size was 0.78 (95% CI: 0.62 to 0.93) with a standardized response mean of -0.65 (95% CI: -0.75 to -0.54).

The Polish version of the QoR-15 questionnaire is a reliable and effective tool for assessing the quality of recovery reported by patients after surgery and general anaesthesia.