Abstract
Quality of life and health status have acquired increasing importance as outcome variables in research, public health, and practice, where the ultimate latent objectives are to improve the lot of the sick and to protect the good fortune of those who are well. How well we do in those parallel objectives can no longer be assessed merely by measuring length of survival in patients or mortality rates in populations. This is not a new idea, since we have been aware of such imperatives for at least 15 years. During this time, clinical investigators, epidemiologists, social scientists, and statisticians have been developing measures of the attributes we term quality of life or quality of survival among patients. We have also invested much intellectual effort in quantifying the somewhat different concept of health status in population.
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Spitzer, W.O. (1991). Quality of Life and Health Status: Innovative Outcome Variables for Research in Population Health. In: Dinkel, R., Horisberger, B., Tolo, K.W. (eds) Improving Drug Safety — A Joint Responsibility. Health Systems Research. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61250-3_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61250-3_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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