Poster Presentation Australian and New Zealand Stroke Organisation Conference 2026

Aphasia-DOOR: Co-designing a multifaceted outcome measure for aphasia intervention research with consumers with lived experience of aphasia. (#101)

Annie J Hill 1 , Robyn O'Halloran 1 , John E Pierce 1 , Miranda Rose 1 , Lisa Anemaat 2 , Marcella Carragher 1 , Lucette Lanyon 1 , Scott Harding 2 , Kate Lawlor 3 , Maya Menahemi Falkov 1 , Morgan Perry 1 , Hayley Rees 1 , Naomi Patterson 1 , Leonid Churilov 4
  1. La Trobe University, Balwyn, VIC, Australia
  2. QARC, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  3. Speech Pathology, Alfred Health, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  4. Biostatistics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Background/Aims

Contemporary aphasia rehabilitation should be multifaceted and dynamic in addressing an individual’s communication goals across impairment, functional and psychosocial domains. To-date, clinical trials in post-stroke aphasia have relied upon multiple single-faceted outcome measures evaluated independently. Thus, these trials may not have described the full extent of outcomes for this highly variable population. This project aimed to co-design a multifaceted outcome measure that ranks outcomes that are meaningful to consumers for use in clinical trials.

Methods

The Desirability of Outcome Ranking (DOOR) methodology [1, 2] was used across two phases. Phase 1: Fifteen consumers with aphasia participated in individual online interviews to discuss outcome measure domains and rank their importance. Participants then met in focus groups to finalise the domain order and individually rank order all combinations of the outcomes to form the Aphasia-DOOR. Phase 2: A new cohort of 10 consumers with aphasia met in focus groups to review the preliminary Aphasia-DOOR and verify its appropriateness and accuracy.  

 

Results

Data collection commenced October 2025 and will end June 30, 2026. We will present the co-designed Aphasia-DOOR and discuss its innovative use in aphasia intervention trials using the ‘tournament method’ [3].

Conclusion

The consumer voice is critical to contemporary research. Aphasia-DOOR may provide a consumer-driven blueprint for how intervention clinical trials measure and report changes across domains that reflect the multifaceted reality and inherent variability of aphasia.

  1. [1] Evans et al., (2015). Desirability of outcome ranking… Clin Infect Dis. 61(5): p. 800-6
  2. [2] Vivash et al., (2023). The adaptation of the desirability of outcome ranking for interventional clinical trials in epilepsy: A novel consumer-led outcome measure. Epilepsia Open, 8:1608–1615.
  3. [3] Churilov et l., (2022). “Tournament Methods” for the Ordinal Analysis of Modified Rankin Scale: The Past, the Present, and the Future. Stroke, 53:3032–3034.