Hernia research in developing countries: are we looking for needles in haystacks? There’s still hope in our reality! Author’s reply

Excerpt

We are grateful for all the replies we have received from our dear colleagues worldwide concerning our Letter to the Editor where we describe our frustration for being unable to contact patients for a long term follow-up following recurrent inguinal hernia repair. This is just a tremendous stimulus for us to keep us going and search for answers in our reality in Brazil. We agree with J.-F. Gillion when he says that we must adapt our aims according to our resources and means [1]. We can assure you that we imagined that we already had the means, as we had the phone number and address of all patients of our institution in a modern electronic database. However, unfortunately, at first we were unable to reach our goal. From now on we are going to focus our efforts on the patient-related outcome measurement (PROM) and use the data we collect from the patients we are able to contact by phone or mail. We hope that with this new approach we will reach a reasonable amount of replies. The answer to Gillions’ first question is: “Yes, it is possible to preserve your phone number when changing companies in Brazil”. However, this does not seem to be the usual pattern within the studied population. The answer to Gillions’ second question is: “No, we cannot ask patients included in our registry to refrain from changing their phone numbers for the first postoperative year”. We always ask our patients to keep their records updated though (event contact the hospital if they change their phone or email). Our patients have clinical visits and surgery free of charge, supported by the public Brazilian healthcare system. …