Patient Recovery From Heart Surgery During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The revised Impact of Events revised version (IES-R) questionnaire (Weiss and Marmar, 1997) is widely used as a measure of event-specific distress and measures distress experienced by serious life changes/events. It has been commonly used to assess persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is an 22 item self-report scale where is item is reported on a five point likert scale from 0 (not at all) to 4 (extremely) with respect to how distressing each item has been during the past week. Scale scores are formed for the three subscales, which reflect intrusion (8 items: 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 14, 16, 20), avoidance (8 items: 5,7,8,11,12,13,17,22), and hyperarousal (6 items: 4,10,15.18.19.21). A cut-off of 26 and above has been suggested for a clinically significant reaction to a psychological trauma, although the IES alone does not diagnose PTSD or reflect a person's ability to function. Metric for summarising data: t-test

Death or survival after cardiac surgery

patient completion of a log sheet documenting all 'visits' (including calls to NHS 111, face-to-face or virtual visits) to the emergency department, hospital admissions and visits to the general practitioner on a standardised proforma for the duration of the study

Health-related quality of life will be measured using the EQ5D-5L questionnaire. The EQ5D is a standardised, simple generic measure of health well, which is received by patients (Kim et al., 2005). It consists of five dimensions (mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort, anxiety/depression) each with five levels of health response and a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0-100 (0 being the worst possible health imaginable and 100 being the best possible health imaginable). Metric for summarising data: t-test

Depression will be measured using the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). The CES-D is a 20-item self-report adult instrument designed to measure common symptoms of depression that have occurred over the past week, such as poor appetite, hopelessness, pessimism, and fatigue. All questions are answered on a scale of 0-3, with 0 indicating no symptom presence and with 3 representing symptoms "most or all of the time." CES-D scores range from 0 to 60 with higher scores indicating more severe depressive symptoms. A score of 16 or higher identifies subjects with clinically meaningful depression. Metric for summarising data: t-test