Alberta Innovates- Health Solutions

Dr. Jeff Johnson is going directly to the source to find out how people feel about their health-related quality of life. The AHFMR Population Health Investigator plans to question a randomly selected group of Albertans about their health in three annual surveys.

Each year, participants will be asked to complete two self-administered questionnaires that measure health-related quality of life. Results from the annual surveys will be compared to measure any changes. "These questionnaires could potentially be used in annual surveys to tell health care planners how healthy they are likely to be a year from now."

The questionnaires, the EuroQol, developed and used in Europe, and the Short Form12 (SF-12), developed and used in the U.S. and other countries, will be evaluated. "If these surveys are found to be useful in predicting healthcare utilization in the province, health care professionals will be able to use them in planning future health care delivery."

Dr. Johnson says. "This information may be useful in determining how scarce health care dollars could be channeled into relevant areas." By asking the same questions that are used in surveys about people's health in other countries, Dr. Johnson hopes to compare the health-related quality of life of Albertans to that of people from other parts of Canada and the world. In the first phase of the study last spring, a questionnaire incorporating questions from the EuroQol and SF-12 was mailed to 4200 Albertans. Recipients were asked to answer several questions about their own health and the health care services they've used in the past year. These included questions about being hospitalized, and about visits to doctors or emergency rooms. Additional questions asked them about their current medical conditions and medical treatment they were receiving.

Two annual follow-up surveys will be conducted to see if people's perceptions of their health has changed, and to determine the kinds of health care resources they've accessed each year between surveys.

Researchers have often used life expectancy and infant mortality rates (indicators which are relatively easy to measure and maintain) to quantify a population's level of health. But these measurements provide little information about people's own perspective of their well-being, says Dr. Johnson. "We've always asked people how they are felling, now we are asking it in a standardized way to obtain standardized evidence of the impact of health care and the health care system from the people's perspective."

Measuring health-related quality of life is a relatively new area of medical research. Dr. Johnson hopes his study will provide new evidence to help determine the most effective surveys for measuring health-related quality of life, and how different surveys compare to each other.

Dr. Jeff Johnson is an AHFMR Population Health Investigator and recipient of an AHFMR Establishment Grant. He receives additional support for his work from the Institute of Pharmaco-Economics, the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and NovoNordisk Canada, Inc.