• About this study
• Study details

Developing a Quality of Life Measure

Using quality of life to guide funding decisions in health and social care

About this study

We aim to find out what people value in their lives and how they weigh up different aspects of the quality of life - such as love and support vs independence.

The findings will be used to develop a short questionnaire and scoring system to measure quality of life in a reliable way.

Potential policy impact

This new measure can be used to guide funding decisions in health and social care. It will be possible to measure the improvement that a particular service or treatment makes to a person's quality of life (on top of medical and other outcomes), and to compare different services or treatments against each other.

The NHS and other organisations can use the measure as part of cost-benefit analyses to ensure that the best funding decisions are made.

Timeline

• September 2008: Commissioned
• October 2008: Start of interviews to develop quality of life descriptions
• September 2009: Quality of life descriptions finalised
• April-June 2010: Survey to calculate scores for the aspects of quality of life
• 2010-2011: Results published in journal articles
• 2011 onwards: Questionnaire and scoring system used in trials and evaluations of health and social care interventions

Method

The study is sponsored by the Medical Research Council and is being carried out by NatCen in collaboration with academics from England and Australia. It builds upon work by the same team to develop a quality of life measure for older adults.

The quality of life attributes were developed during in-depth interviews, carried out by researchers at Birmingham University.

A larger survey by NatCen was used to develop the scoring system. Over 400 adults in Britain took part in this face-to-face interview about their quality of life. The main part of the interview was an exercise to choose the best and worst aspect of a hypothetical situation, which allowed the relative importance of each aspect of quality of life to be calculated.

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