Prof. dr. A.M. Stiggelbout

Health-related Quality of Life: measurement issues

Workshop Leader: Prof. dr. A.M. Stiggelbout

Department: Medical Decision Making, Leiden University Medical Center

This workshop will address aspects of the measurement of quality of life in health care. It will mostly focus on descriptive measures, i.e. questionnaires that generate so-called quality of life profiles, such as the SF-36. We will not have time to discuss the valuation of quality of life (utility assessment, using Standard Gamble or Time TradeOff, to assess Qualty Adjusted Life Years), but for those interested a reference list will be provided.

Descriptive quality of life assessment uses both generic and disease-specific questionnaires, and the pros and cons of these will be discussed and examples will be presented. More general issues related to questionnaire development will be briefly touched upon. Other topics will be the analysis and reporting of data from quality of life studies.

Depending on the interests and experience of the participants we can further focus on specific phases of quality of life studies, or on special topics.