Extending the QALY

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Going beyond health related quality of life – towards a broader QALY measure for use across sectors

• IRAS ID

  234172

• Contact name

  Julie Johnson

• Contact email

  Julie.Johnson@Sheffield.ac.uk

• Duration of Study in the UK

  2 years, 5 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  The aim of this project is to develop a new questionnaire that captures the impact of health and social care interventions on health and broader quality of life aspects as judged to be important by service users and those who are impacted, such as carers. The new measure needs to be able to be scored so that it reflects how important each aspect is to people. Ideally, the new measure will be translated into other languages and used internationally.
  There are three key distinctions between this new measure and existing health and well-being measures:
  1) it aims to be applicable across a number of sectors (health, social care, carers, and public health)
  2) it aims to capture broader quality of life and well-being, not just health
  3) it will be designed so it can be used in economic evaluations of health and social care interventions.

  The project contains six stages:
  Stage 1: Establish the aspects of life deemed important by service users.
  Identify these aspects by reviewing previous research that interviewed patients, carers or social care users about their quality of life.

  Stage 2: Generate a list of potential questions for each aspect.

  Stage 3: Face validity Interviews
  Conduct fifty face to face interviews with patients, carers and social care service users to check the potential questions make sense.

  Stage 4: Psychometric testing of items
  Conduct survey of two thousand patients, carers, social care users or members of the public to check if the questions perform as expected.

  Stage 5: Valuation of the measure
  Standard methods will be used to value and score the measure.

  Stage 6: Implementation, dissemination, and impact
  Understand the policy implications of using the new instrument, and how it differs to existing instruments. Widespread dissemination to stakeholder and academic audiences.

• REC name

  Social Care REC

• REC reference

  18/IEC08/0016

• Date of REC Opinion

  14 Jun 2018

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion