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79th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery

German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery

30.04. - 04.05.2008, Bonn

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Otitis Media related quality of life

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German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. 79th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. Bonn, 30.04.-04.05.2008. Düsseldorf, Köln: German Medical Science; 2008. Doc08hno45

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.egms.de/en/meetings/hno2008/08hno45.shtml

Published: July 8, 2008

© 2008 Bardanis.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en). You are free: to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work, provided the original author and source are credited.

Outline

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Introduction: The list of articles and papers on otitis media is literally endless and keeps on augmenting. However, most of them are medicine centered, not human centered.

Objective: To objectify the subjective parents’ perception of the influence of COME and RAOM on everyday life of their children and themselves.

Setting: The outpatient practice of an ENT Department of a regional Hospital that serves 3 islands in the Aegean Sea.

Method: The parents that accompanied 158 children suffering from COME and RAOM answered a certain questionnaire based on OM-6 and OMO-22 regarding six parameters affected by the specific disease.

Results: The parents’ emotional status seems to be mostly influenced by their children’s disease in this group, whereas the speech of their children proves to be the least influenced, according to their perception.

Conclusion: The first priority of the parents with regard to this specific disease does not necessarily coincide with the one of the doctors. This is a factor that we – the doctors – have to reconsider, if we want to boast that we exercise human centered quality medicine.

Abbreviations:

COME: Chronic Otitis Media with Effusion, RAOM: Recurrent Acute Otitis Media, OM-6: Otitis Media – 6 (6-item quality of life survey), OMO-22: Otitis Media Outcome – 22 (22-item questionnaire)