Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Over 10% of Canadians over the age of 35 are living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). These individuals have a hard time breathing and moving around in their environment. Current treatments offer many benefits for people with COPD, but it is often difficult to make decisions about which treatments should be approved and at what cost. Quality of life questionnaires are available to evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of treatments in COPD. These questionnaires are called 'generic preference-based measures' (GPBMs for short). Since these questionnaires are generic (common to the general public), they may not reflect the specific health concerns that are important to people with COPD. The purpose of the study is to evaluate the extent to which these measures capture areas of quality of life that are important to people with COPD. This evaluation will be done by asking people with COPD to fill out two questionnaires: one assessing the areas of quality of life important to them; the Patient-Generated Index (PGI), and one generic quality of life measure; the RAND-36. The results from the RAND-36 will be transformed into GPBM scores (i.e. SF-6D scores). The results from the PGI will be compared against these results and common GPBMs. If the GPBMs capture areas reported as being important to the quality of life of people with COPD, then they can be used by government healthcare workers to make clinical decisions about which treatments to put into practice for this population.