What is the best approach to adopt for identifying the domains for a new measure of health, social care and carer-related quality of life to measure quality-adjusted life years? Application to the development of the EQ-HWB?

A recent paper exploring approaches for choosing domains within preference-based measures of health and quality of life has been published by Dr Tessa Peasgood and Professor Nancy Devlin from the Health Economics Unit, Centre for Health Policy in collaboration with researchers from Sheffield and Kent Universities and the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence in the UK has been published in the European Journal of Health Economics.

This paper explores different methods that can be used to identify the content of a new generic instrument to measure Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). It covers how to identify domains and who should provide information on the domains. The paper sets out the case for an approach that relies on the voice of patients, social care users and informal carers as the main source of information and describes how this approach was operationalised in the ‘Extending the QALY’ project which developed the new measure, the EQ-HWB (EQ Health and Wellbeing instrument).