Concept Of Quality Of Life Essay

Quality–Of-Life In Patients

Introduction

Quality of life (QOL) is an amorphous concept and is still taken to refer to the conceptions of the goodness of life. It is a concept that broadly covers all the aspects of human experience about the necessities of life, and is characterized as individuals’ subjective well-being with general measures of how happy and/or satisfied they are with their life as a whole. There are broad notions of QOL that encompass satisfaction about housing, employment, standard of living, marriage, interpersonal relationships, religion, and environment. However, the health care system and its providers do not take responsibility for all these global human concerns, and therefore a distinction is made with regard to health-related quality of life (HRQOL). (1)

Although QOL and HRQOL are often used interchangeably to refer to the same concept, there are differences between the two. As described previously, QOL is a broad concept covering all aspects of human life, whereas HRQOL focuses on the effects of illness and specifically on the impact of treatment on QOL [5]. HRQOL is a reflection of the way that individuals perceive and react to their health status and the nonmedical aspects of their lives, which include health-related factors, such as

As noted by Deyo and Patrick (1989), disease specific measures have greater salience for physicians, better focus on functional areas of particular concern, and may possess greater responsiveness to disease-specific interventions. On the other hand generic measures permit comparisons across interventions and diagnostic conditions, which is particularly important for policy makers [resource allocation]. They also allow dysfunction to be quantified for an individual experiencing several disease conditions (Bombardier et al., 1986; Temkin et al.,