Grant: Operating Grant

Quality of life (QoL) has become an important piece of information in addition to efficacy and safety when evaluating treatment effects. A common way of gathering QoL is to use a questionnaire to obtain the description of a person's health status and assign a value to it. The difference in values before and after a treatment would be the impact of the treatment on QoL and this information will help form decisions about the efficient use of health care resources (improving patient outcomes while saving health care expenditures). A key challenge is how to assign values to different health states in a reliable and valid way. There is consensus among the research community that the values should come from the general public based on the fact that any such decision made within a taxpayer-supported health care system (like Canada) will affect all taxpayers. A QoL questionnaire, called the EuroQol, developed by an international research group, has been the most widely used in the world for the past decades. Recently a new version of this questionnaire has been developed with more response options for each of the five questions. Therefore, the proposed study will be the first study in the world to develop a system that can be used to assign values to the health states defined by this instrument. This study will interview a large random sample of the Canadian general population using the EuroQol questionnaire and a number of carefully designed questions to gather the preferences and attitudes of the general public to different health states. This information will allow us to develop a scoring system for the questionnaire. It is important to incorporate the opinions from the general public into medical decision making. Having a scoring system will enable accurate valuation of health states and make medical decisions more reliable and ethical. As the first study adopting novel methods, it will also establish Canada as a leader in this research community.