Health-related Quality of Life Flashcards
Give three commonly used measures of health.
Mortality, morbidity and patient-based outcomes.
What do patient based outcomes assess?
Attempt to assess well-being from patient’s point of view by comparing scores before and after treatment or over longer periods.
What can patient-based outcomes be used for?
They can be used to assess cost-benefits, in clinical audit, to measure health of populations, to compare interventions in a clinical trial, as a measure of service quality.
What are two reasons often given in favour of introducing PROMs?
PROMs (Patient Reported Outcome Measures) Improves clinical management of patients, allows comparison of hospitals.
What are the challenges of PROMs?
PROMs (Patient Reported Outcome Measures) Minimising the time and cost of collection/analysis/presentation, achieving high rates of patient participation, providing different output to different audiences, avoiding misuse.
What is “health-related quality of life”?
The functional effect of an illness and its consequent therapy on a patient, as perceived by the patient.
What are the two basic groupings of “instruments” that can be used to measure health related QoL?
GENERIC (can be used with any population, cover general perception of overall health, can cover emotional health too)
SPECIFIC (evaluates a series of health dimensions specific to a disease)
Give some advantages of generic instruments.
Can be used for much broader range (or if no disease specific instrument), enables comparison across treatment groups, can detect unexpected effects, can assess health of populations.
Give some disadvantages of generic instruments.
Less detailed, loss of relevance, less sensitive to changes, may be less acceptable to patients.
What are the three types of specific instruments in measuring QoL?
Disease specific, site specific, dimension specific.
Give some advantages of specific instruments used for measuring QoL.
Very relevant content, sensitive to change, acceptable to patients.
Give some disadvantages of specific instruments for measuring QoL.
Can’t be used on people who don’t have the disease, comparison is limited, may not detect unexpected effects.
