The SEIQoL and functional status: how do they relate?

Abstract

Over recent years, an emphasis has emerged in UK and international policy documents, over the involvement of people in the delivery of health care. However, evaluations of health services still largely rest on outcome measures that reflect professional concerns. As new health services are being developed, new patientcentred outcome measures are needed to evaluate them. This paper aims at exploring the possibility of individual quality of life as an outcome measure for health services.As a first step, it aims to elucidate the relationship of functional outcome measures to the Schedule for the Evaluation of Individual Quality of Life (SEIQoL), in groups of people whose age or medical diagnosis serve as the basis for health service design. Its objectives are to study the relation of SEIQoL scores and life areas to functional status in an older population and in a group of people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Older people selected their health most frequently as one of the most important areas in their life (9.9%, versus 8.6% for people with COPD), and were more satisfied with it (U=2512, p=0.007). People's health status did not impact on the way they defined their quality of life, but on their level of satisfaction with discrete life areas. The weights attributed to health were significantly negatively correlated to people's overall quality of life score in the overall sample (rho=-0.34, p<0.001).In the light of recent national and international policy documents advocating for the development of new, more person centred health services, our results supports the proposition of the authors of SEIQoL, that individual quality of life measures have the potential to bring a significant contribution to the evaluation health services.3

Individual Quality of Life in Chronic Kidney Disease

“…These findings differ from previous reports of older adults (aged Ͼ75 yr) with good health status and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (30) in that health, finances, and work/ school cues appear much more frequently in our study, emphasizing the potential differences and effects of disease in these patient groups. In contrast to other studies in which health is an infrequently nominated domain by the chronically ill and more frequently nominated by healthy individuals (31,32), health seems to be an important contributor to IQOL in patients with CKD and dialysis patients; however, it is noteworthy that approximately one third of patients with significant renal dysfunction did not nominate health as a QOL domain.…”

The use, feasibility and psychometric properties of an individualised quality-of-life instrument: a systematic review of the SEIQoL-DW

“…In line with this, some studies asked more specifically for the quality of each nominated domain: for example, ''… rate each domain between best possible and worst possible …'' [10,11,21,22,49,50]. Ten of the reports explicitly asked participants to rate the nominated domains regarding satisfaction [19,20,26,28,36,[39][40][41][42]53] and additionally four studies asked for rating of functioning and/or satisfaction [27,44,46,48].…”

“…Convergent validity examined by correlations between the SEIQoL Index score and other self-reported measures of overall QoL, mental health and social function was presented in 36% of the papers (n = 14) [17,20,21,25,26,30,33,35,36,39,41,45,46,48]. In some cases, the magnitude of the coefficients were not reported and only presented as non-significant.…”

“…Discriminant validity was measured by correlations between the SEIQoL Index score and self-reported measures of health and functional status in eight studies (Table 3) [20,25,26,28,32,35,42,43]. Four of the coefficients were moderate (.30-.49), while eight were weak (r \ .30).…”

Rhetoric and reality of daily life in English care homes: the role of organised activities

“…The emphasis in care home research to date has predominantly been a reductionist approach to care giving (Lhussier et al 2005;Markle-Ried & Browne 2003), where care giving has been reduced to basic care with a focus on supporting ADLs. Within the context of both health and social care assessments, ADLs relate predominantly to personal hygiene, dressing and eating (Katz et al 1963;Lawton & Brody 1969;Roper et al 2000).…”