Most health care aims to improve patients' health - and it is patients themselves who are best placed to judge how they feel.

Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are questionnaires that patients are asked to complete before and after treatments to assess how they feel, from their own perspective.

A new national programme for NHS Wales is developing the use of PROMs so patients and clinicians can make better decisions together.

As part of this programme we aim to collect questionnaires from patients across Wales, however the work will progress in phases and with different health boards and specialities coming on board at different times and pace.

Not all questionnaires will be the same, depending on your condition or at what stage of the treatment you are, you may be asked to complete different questionnaires, or you may be asked to complete the same one at different points in time to see how your health is changing.

The questionnaires will be used to help you and your health care team decide the treatment that best fits your needs and wishes. Both you and your clinical team will be able to see your answers once you complete the questionnaire, however this facility may not be always available in the early stages of the programme.

With your consent we'd also like to use the questionnaires for research and service or treatment development - so that hopefully we can better understand how effective treatments are and help develop new ones more quickly. To do this we will make sure all information that identifies you (for example your year of birth, your hospital number, etc) is removed so all answers will be anonymous.

From late 2016, some patients will be asked to complete the questionnaire from the comfort of their own home by logging into a website and using a personalised ID code they will find in their hospital referral acknowledgement letter.

We hope we will be able to offer this option to an ever growing number of patients. In the meantime, a few patients will also be asked to complete the questionnaires in clinics, using some designated iPads and with the assistance of health care staff if needed.

If you have been asked to complete a PROMs questionnaire and want to learn more, click here to read some frequently asked questions.

If you want to ask questions about your appointment or treatment, please use the contact included in your referral acknowledgement letter.