Introduction
DCM, Myelopathy, cord impairment, degenerative cervical myelopathy
MYELOPATHY, DISEASE, DEGENERATIVE, CERVICAL MYELOPATHY
Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) is the most common cause of spinal cord impairment worldwide [AO Spine RECODE-DCM (REsearch objectives and Common Data Elements for Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy) was a multi-stakeholder, international consensus process aiming to accelerate DCM research through recommendations that improve research efficiency [The process of establishing research priorities is supported by organisations such as the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) James Lind Alliance (JLA) [A major driver of research inefficiency is the underrepresentation of end-users, including people living with degenerative cervical myelopathy (PwDCM), within research design [We also hypothesised that word clouds would help mitigate against a unique challenge for the DCM PSP, that a diversity of healthcare professionals is involved in DCM care, but generally, the practice of each healthcare professional group is confined to a limited stage of the disease, such as initial diagnosis [Word clouds are a tool which enable qualitative data to be displayed, with the relative importance or frequency of each idea is proportional to the size of the word in the cloud. In the medical literature, word clouds have mainly been used to report qualitative patient interview data [The methodology for the generation of the word clouds used in the AO Spine RECODE-DCM PSP has been described in detail elsewhere [