SAGE Journals Online
Advertisement
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.

 

Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Advertisement

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Surgical Innovation
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Urbach, D. R.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Urbach, D. R.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Measuring Quality of Life After Surgery

David R. Urbach, MD, MSc

Departments of Surgery and Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Cancer Care Ontario; Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, Health Research Personnel Development Program; Toronto General Hospital, 200 Elizabeth Street, 10 NU-214, Toronto, ON M5G 2C4, Canada david.urbach{at}uhn.on.ca

Measures of quality of life are used increasingly to evaluate the outcome of surgical care. Impairment in quality of life is a major reason why patients seek surgical care, and changes in health-related quality of life are how patients assess the effect of treatment. Disease-specific measures focus on a particular health condition and are useful for detecting change resulting from treatment. Generic measures cover a wider spectrum of quality of life, provide a global assessment of a patient's overall health, and allow comparisons with other health conditions. Quality of life is not measured directly but is commonly sampled by using measurement scales in the form of questionnaires. The important properties of quality-of-life measurement scales are reliability, the extent to which a measure provides similar values for individuals with similar underlying quality of life; validity, the extent to which it measures what it purports to measure; responsiveness, the extent to which changes in correlate with true changes in quality of life; and sensitivity, the extent to which a measure can detect meaningful changes in quality of life.

Key Words: quality of life • questionnaires • outcome of surgical care

Surgical Innovation, Vol. 12, No. 2, 161-165 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/155335060501200216
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?




Advertisement