Quality Of Life Flashcards
List 3 commonly used measures of health.
- morbidity
- morality
- patient-based outcomes
What are patient-based outcomes? How do they normally work?
Patient-based outcomes assess well-being from the patients point of view - they work by comparing scores before and after treatment over longer periods
Why are patient-based outcomes being more predominantly used?
There has been an increase in conditions where the aim is managing, as opposed to curing, the condition
Give 2 examples of a patient-based outcome.
- health-related quality of life (HRQoL)
- patient-reported outcome measure (PROM)
Give 2 reasons why using PROMs may be beneficial.
- improve the clinical management of patients
- comparison of providers (hospitals)
What 4 clinical procedures in the NhS are currently using PROMs?
- hip replacements
- knee replacements
- groin hernia
- varicose veins
Define health-related quality of life.
Quality of life in clinical medicine represents the functional effect of an illness and its consequent therapy on a patient, as perceived by the patient
How may you measure the HRQoL using a PROM?
By using questionnaires known as instruments
What is an instrument? Briefly describe 2 types.
An instrument is a type of questionnaire that can be used to makes health-related quality of life (HRQoL):
- generic instrument - can be used with any population
- specific instrument - evaluates a series of health dimensions for a specific condition or disease
List 3 advantages and 3 disadvantages of generic instruments.
Advantages include:
- they can be used for a broad range of health problems
- they can be used if theres no existing disease-specific instrument
- they enable comparisons across treatment groups
Disadvantages include:
- they are inherently less detailed
- they may be too general and loss relevance to the condition
- they may be less sensitive to changes that result from an intervention
What is the SF-36 an example of? How is it scored?
The SF-36 is an example of a generic instrument - questions to 8 dimensions are scored, and within each dimension are added together - a score from each dimension is then calculated
List the 8 dimensions that compose an SF-36.
- physical functioning
- social functioning
- role functioning (physical)
- role functioning (emotional)
- bodily pain
- vitality
- general health
- mental health
In an SF-36, are the separate dimensions added together to give an overall score? Why?
No - this can make interpretation difficult in some cases and makes generalisations of results (ignoring outliers)
What is the EuroQol EQ-5D?
A generic instrument that generates a single index value for health status on which full health is assigned a value of 1 and death is assigned a value of 0
Where is a EuroQol EQ-5D particularly useful?
It is particularly useful in economic evaluations