Searching for the phrase ‘quality of life’ (QoL) on PMLive.com generates up to 150 hits, most of which reference new medicines that have been designed to improve patients’ physical and mental wellbeing. These innovative products are appreciated by patients, who count quality of life among their major concerns.
Although patients desire QoL, they do not, by all accounts, seem to be getting it from healthcare systems. One reason is that the patient perspective is not necessarily shared by national reimbursement agencies – or even by doctors. These often cite high cost and/or ineffectiveness to reject the very treatments that patients welcome.
Professionally deployed yardsticks to appraise clinical worth take little account of patients’ views – a fact recognised in a recent analysis in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The BMJ authors called for better, standardised, validated tools to assess the patient experience from the patient’s own standpoint
