MHE Showcases Global Leadership in Quality-of-Life Measurement

Dr Cate Bailey from our Melbourne Health Economics team is making a global impact through our ongoing collaboration with EuroQol, the quality-of-life measurement research network that developed a range of instrument including the widely used EQ-5D. Our work centres on validating the EQ-HWB, a new quality-of-life instrument designed for use in economic evaluations in health and social care.

At the recent EuroQol Plenary and EQ-HWB Working Group meeting in Vienna, in September 2025, Dr Bailey played a important role in finalising the short-form version of the instrument, the EQ-HWB-9. New, yet to be published, findings were presented to the Working Group and Dr Bailey also presented a second project through a plenary poster presentation.

Our research program has now produced six peer-reviewed publications validating the EQ-HWB, marking a major contribution to the field, with more under review. The first of these, The performance of the EQ-HWB-S as a measure of quality-of-life of caregivers in families that have experienced adverse events achieved a Field-Weighted Citation Index of 27.66, placing it in the top 1% of cited papers worldwide.

Following the Plenary, Dr Cate Bailey embarked on an “EQ-HWB Tour of Europe”, presenting an overview of our work at the Hamburg Center for Health Economics - University of Hamburg, and Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences - University of Oxford, before concluding with a stay as visiting scholar at the SCHARR - University of Sheffield to advance collaborative EuroQol projects.