Webinar: A Closer Look at the BREAST-Q

Dr. Pusic is Associate Professor, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University in New York City. She completed a Master’s degree in Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and Plastic Surgery residency at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Her research focus is measurement of patient-reported outcomes in surgery. Beginning in 2003, with grant support from the Plastic Surgery Foundation, she and a team of international collaborators set out to develop the BREAST-Q. Following on the success of this project, Dr. Pusic and her team have recently developed the FACE-Q, a PRO instrument for facial aesthetic patients and the BODY-Q, for both bariatric and aesthetic body contouring patients.

In 2007, she was awarded Clinical Research Recognition Award and in 2014, the Distinguished Service Award by the Plastic Surgery Foundation. Currently, she is co-PI of the National Breast Implant Registry, co-PI of the Mastectomy Reconstruction Outcome Consortium study (R01 CA-152192-01-A1) and VicePresident of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

Anne Klassen is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. At McMaster, she is also Associate Member of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics and Scientist in CanChild, a world renown centre for childhood disability research.

She completed her doctorate in the Health Services Research Unit at the University of Oxford in 1997. Her thesis was one of the first studies to measure HR-QOL in plastic and cosmetic surgery patients. She has received postdoctoral, new investigator and mid-career award funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Her area of expertise is developing PRO instruments that measure outcomes that matter to pediatric and adult patients. She is co-developer of a number of PRO instruments for plastic and reconstructive surgery patients, including the BREAST-Q, FACE-Q, BODY-Q and CLEFT-Q.

Stefan Cano is co-founder and chief science officer at Modus Outcomes, a contract research organisation specialising in the development of Clinical Outcome Assessments. He is also a Chartered Psychologist with over 20 years of experience in psychometric and scale development research.

Stefan initially studied Psychology at University College London, UK, and later completed a PhD in Health Services Research at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK. Stefan has developed PRO instruments for plastic surgery (i.e. upper limb, skin cancers), neurology (i.e. Cervical Dystonia, Friedreich’s Ataxia, neuropathic pain), and has contributed to the construction of numerous others (including multiple sclerosis, dementia, and cardiac surgery). He has published more than 100 research articles in international peer reviewed journals. Stefan’s role in the development of BREAST-Q, FACE-Q, BODY-Q, and CLEFT-Q centers around scale content generation and psychometric analysis.