Page 120 - Psychology of Wounds and Wound Care in Clinical Practice ( PDFDrive )

94 Chapter 4. Quality of Life and Well- Being

aches or pains and what impact that has had on their
QoL. The questions are therefore applicable to the general
population and measures can be applied to any disease group
and even healthy individuals.
The second approach uses measures that are specific to a
condition or population. Questions therefore concern issues
related to a particular illness and its treatment. Thus a mea-
sure designed to assess the HRQoL of a patient with a
wound, would ask about the impact of wound related
symptoms such as wound pain and exudate on an individual’s
QoL. Questions are also likely to address issues such as the
effect of treatments factors such as dressings change, com-
pression bandaging or NPWT. Thus a condition-specific mea-
sure covers issues pertaining to a specific disease or population
and as such can only be applied to the disease or population
for which they were developed
Because of this specificity, such instruments are likely to
be more powerful at detecting intervention effects than
generic instruments. This is not to say that condition–specific
instruments provide “better” assessments of HRQoL, rather
the choice of generic or specific depends on the purpose of
the assessment. Thus generic measures should be used for
comparisons of HRQoL across different wound types, and
between those with a chronic wound and those without. They
can therefore be administered to different populations to
examine the impact of general health care initiatives and as
such offer potential for measuring change in a population.
Condition specific measures will however be more useful
when making comparisons within a specific disease or popu-
lation – for example when considering the relative benefits
and costs of different treatment regimes for individuals with
wounds. Examples of both generic and disease specific mea-
sures commonly applied to wound care populations is given
in Table 4.1 .
Whilst generic and disease specific measures have a differ-
ent focus for their questions, both share a multidimensional
construct that integrates a number of features including
physical, social and psychological functioning (see Table 4.2 ).