Aims: To examine short term and long term health related quality of life (HRQoL) of survivors of congenital anorectal malformations (ARM) and congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH), and to compare these patients' HRQoL with that of the general population. Methods: HRQoL was measured in 286 ARM patients and 111 CDH patients. All patients were administered a symptom checklist and a generic HRQoL measure. For the youngest children (aged 1-4) the TAIQOL (a preliminary version of the TAPQOL) was used, for the other children (aged 5-15) the TACQOL questionnaire, and for adults (aged .16) the SF-36. Results: As appeared from the symptom checklists, many patients remained symptomatic into adulthood. In the youngest ARM patients (aged 1-4 years), generic HRQoL was severely affected, but the older ARM patients showed better HRQoL. In the CDH patients, the influence of symptoms on HRQoL seemed less profound. The instruments we used revealed little difference between adults treated for ARM or CDH and the general population. Conclusions: These results show that for two neonatal surgical procedures, improved survival does not come at the expense of poor HRQoL in adults. Even though there is considerable suffering in terms of both morbidity and mortality in the youngest group, the ultimate prognosis of survivors of the two studied congenital malformations is favourable. This finding can be used to reassure parents of patients in need of neonatal surgery for one of these conditions about the prospects for their child.

There is a new merging of health economics and nutrition disciplines to assess the impact of diet on health and disease prevention and to characterise the health and economic aspects of specific changes in nutritional behaviour and nutrition recommendations. A rationale exists for developing the field of nutrition economics which could offer a better understanding of both nutrition, in the context of having a significant influence on health outcomes, and economics, in order to estimate the absolute and relative monetary impact of health measures. For this purpose, an expert meeting assessed questions aimed at clarifying the scope and identifying the key issues that should be taken into consideration in developing nutrition economics as a discipline that could potentially address important questions. We propose a first multidisciplinary outline for understanding the principles and particular characteristics of this emerging field. We summarise here the concepts and the observations of workshop participants and propose a basic setting for nutrition economics and health outcomes research as a novel discipline to support nutrition, health economics and health policy development in an evidence and health-benefit-based manner.

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Although on most domains the safety culture in our unit was good when compared to benchmark data, there is still room for improvement. This requires us to continue working on interventions intended to improve the safety culture, including crew resource management training, safety briefings, and senior executive walk rounds. More research is needed into the impact of creating a safety culture on patient outcomes.