The Glasgow Children's Benefit Inventory: A New Instrument for Assessing Health-Related Benefit after an Intervention

Abstract

Most health-related quality-of-life measures make an assessment at a single point in time. Comparing results before and after an intervention is often difficult, because the difference measured is usually small compared with the variation between individuals. A retrospectively applied measure specifically worded to assess benefit would be very useful for clinical research. Such a measure exists for adults. We aimed to develop a similar measure for children. We chose potential items after reviewing existing health-related quality-of-life measures, published literature, and parental interviews. A draft questionnaire was given to a group of parents and modified. The resulting Glasgow Children's Benefit Inventory (GCBI) comprised 24 questions on the consequences of a specified intervention on various aspects of the child's day-to-day life, without reference to any specific symptoms, and was worded to apply to children of any age. The questionnaire was mailed to the parents of all 1,777 children who had undergone tonsillectomy or ventilation tube insertion at one hospital during the period January 1998 to December 2001. There were 670 questionnaires returned. The GCBI scores correlated well with parental satisfaction with surgery and with estimates of technical success (residual sore throats, reported hearing impairment, ear infections). The questionnaire had high internal consistency. Factor analysis showed 4 dimensions in the pattern of responses relating to emotion, physical health, learning, and vitality. The GCBI is a means to retrospectively assess benefit after an intervention in children, and we have shown initial evidence of reliability and validity. Although not restricted to any branch of pediatric medicine, it is eminently suitable for use in pediatric otolaryngology.

Questionário ABEL - Auditory Behavior in Everyday Life: estudo da confiabilidade - consistência interna da versão brasileira e reprodutibilidade no teste-reteste

“…Application of Statistics Cronbach's Alpha Test showed high internal consistency ( Table 4). Other researchers sought to conduct similar investigations for this instrument in its English version and other instruments used in the evaluation of clinical interventions, finding reproducibility and/ or internal consistency similar to those observed in the present study 5,7,[11][12][13] . When checking if results of the first application of the questionnaire could be associated with quantitative variables studied in anamnesis, namely, the difference between age at diagnosis and age at fitting, daily use of hearing aids and degree of hearing loss, no statistically significant associations were found between the questionnaire score and the difference between the age at diagnosis of hearing loss and the time of the hearing aid fitting.…”

Child behavior and quality of life before and after tonsillotomy versus tonsillectomy

“…Six months after surgery, the parents repeated the OSA-18 and CBCL, and assessed the benefits of the surgery using the Glasgow Children's Benefit Inventory (GCBI) [24]. GCBI is designed to measure the benefit to the quality of life of a child's day-to-day life resulting from interventions such as surgery.…”

A systematic review of patient-reported outcome measures in paediatric otolaryngology

“…40 A number of general patient-reported outcome measures are described in the paediatric otolaryngology literature. The Glasgow Children's Benefit Inventory ('GCBI') was developed by Kubba et al 44 to assess health-related QoL pre-and post-intervention, and has been extensively validated and used in a number of otolaryngology interventions. [45][46][47][48] The less widespread use of this tool outside otolaryngology limits the global comparability of its findings with other non-otolaryngology interventions, which may be of importance to certain groups such as commissioners.…”