The evaluation of health related quality of life

Research on quality of life has been gaining significance for the last few years. Including the holistic and interdisciplinary view on the
situation of a patient, not only have they become a sign of care about a patient’s well-being, but also the expression of engagement of many
professionals.

Medical decisions concerning treatment are being made on different levels of medical services. They include the planning of medical care
for an individual patient through assessing the effectiveness of drugs or intervention, in which not only the objective indicators, but also the
so often disregarded subjective assessment of a patient’s state of health done by the patient themselves and the patient’s functioning in their
important areas, are crucial.

Conception of quality of life has also penetrated valid health definitions and after a while has become an important and necessary element.
Actually it is supplementing the patient’s health evaluation. In order to evaluate the patient’s health objectively, the biomedical indicators are
used. However certain aspects of the state of health cannot be confined to such parameters, that is capability to function normally at home,
work, society, to be free from pain or other physical and mental disorders. That is why, in order to express these particular aspects it is
proposed to survey the quality of life using specially designed tools, such as questionnaires. Once the notion of quality of life is introduced,
a patient becomes a co-participant of the medical procedures. Quality of life assessment also has its indirect influence on care quality syturesearch
and constitutes a crucial criterion of drug effectiveness assessment. Therefore a full judgement of treatment effectiveness should
include not only the biomedical indicators, but also the patient’s direct health evaluation, which consists of the influence of an applied
treatment on quality of their life.

The main purpose of this article, based on a professional literature, is to present the meaning and application of the quality of life concept to
the present-day medicine.