Health and Quality of Life Outcomes

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History

The journal was established in 2003 and is published by BioMed Central. The editor-in-chief is Holger Schünemann (McMaster University). According to the Journal Citation Reports , the journal has a 2017 impact factor of 2.278. [1]

Related Research Articles

Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns". Standard indicators of the quality of life include wealth, employment, the environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, social belonging, religious beliefs, safety, security and freedom. QOL has a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, politics and employment. Health related QOL (HRQOL) is an evaluation of QOL and its relationship with health.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health care</span> Prevention of disease and promotion of wellbeing

Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, athletic training, and other health professions all constitute health care. It includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, and tertiary care, as well as in public health.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Environmental health</span> Public health branch focused on environmental impacts on human health

Environmental health is the branch of public health concerned with all aspects of the natural and built environment affecting human health. In order to effectively control factors that may affect health, the requirements that must be met in order to create a healthy environment must be determined. The major sub-disciplines of environmental health are environmental science, toxicology, environmental epidemiology, and environmental and occupational medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Institute for Health and Care Excellence</span> Non-departmental public body of the Department of Health in the United Kingdom

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care in England that publishes guidelines in four areas:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preventive healthcare</span> Prevent and minimize the occurrence of diseases

Preventive healthcare, or prophylaxis is the application of healthcare measures to prevent diseases. Disease and disability are affected by environmental factors, genetic predisposition, disease agents, and lifestyle choices, and are dynamic processes which begin before individuals realize they are affected. Disease prevention relies on anticipatory actions that can be categorized as primal, primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quality-adjusted life year</span> Measure of disease burden

The quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is a generic measure of disease burden, including both the quality and the quantity of life lived. It is used in economic evaluation to assess the value of medical interventions. One QALY equates to one year in perfect health. QALY scores range from 1 to 0 (dead). QALYs can be used to inform health insurance coverage determinations, treatment decisions, to evaluate programs, and to set priorities for future programs.

The social determinants of health (SDOH) are the economic and social conditions that influence individual and group differences in health status. They are the health promoting factors found in one's living and working conditions, rather than individual risk factors that influence the risk for a disease, or vulnerability to disease or injury. The distributions of social determinants are often shaped by public policies that reflect prevailing political ideologies of the area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disability-adjusted life year</span> Measure of disease burden

The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death. It was developed in the 1990s as a way of comparing the overall health and life expectancy of different countries.

A patient-reported outcome (PRO) is a health outcome directly reported by the patient who experienced it. It stands in contrast to an outcome reported by someone else, such as a physician-reported outcome, a nurse-reported outcome, and so on. PRO methods, such as questionnaires, are used in clinical trials or other clinical settings, to help better understand a treatment's efficacy or effectiveness. The use of digitized PROs, or electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs), is on the rise in today's health research setting.

Health services research (HSR) became a burgeoning field in North America in the 1960s, when scientific information and policy deliberation began to coalesce. Sometimes also referred to as health systems research or health policy and systems research (HPSR), HSR is a multidisciplinary scientific field that examines how people get access to health care practitioners and health care services, how much care costs, and what happens to patients as a result of this care. HSR utilizes all qualitative and quantitative methods across the board to ask questions of the healthcare system. It focuses on performance, quality, effectiveness and efficiency of health care services as they relate to health problems of individuals and populations, as well as health care systems and addresses wide-ranging topics of structure, processes, and organization of health care services; their use and people's access to services; efficiency and effectiveness of health care services; the quality of healthcare services and its relationship to health status, and; the uses of medical knowledge.

Unwarranted variation in health care service delivery refers to medical practice pattern variation that cannot be explained by illness, medical need, or the dictates of evidence-based medicine. It is one of the causes of low value care often ignored by health systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PatientsLikeMe</span> Health management social networking website

PatientsLikeMe is an integrated community, health management, and real-world data platform. The platform currently has over 830,000 members who are dealing with more than 2,900 conditions. Data generated by patients themselves are systemically collected and quantified with a goal to provide an environment for peer support and learning. These data capture the complex temporality and competing influences of different lifestyle choices, socio-demographics, conditions, and treatments on a person's health. While striving to empower the community with personal agency, PLM has also established itself as a clinical resource, with more than 100 studies in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals.

Outcomes research is a branch of public health research which studies the end results of the structure and processes of the health care system on the health and well-being of patients and populations. According to one medical outcomes and guidelines source book - 1996, Outcomes research includes health services research that focuses on identifying variations in medical procedures and associated health outcomes. Though listed as a synonym for the National Library of Medicine MeSH term "Outcome Assessment ", outcomes research may refer to both health services research and healthcare outcomes assessment, which aims at Health technology assessment, decision making, and policy analysis through systematic evaluation of quality of care, access, and effectiveness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quality of life (healthcare)</span> Notion in healthcare

In general, quality of life is the perceived quality of an individual's daily life, that is, an assessment of their well-being or lack thereof. This includes all emotional, social and physical aspects of the individual's life. In health care, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is an assessment of how the individual's well-being may be affected over time by a disease, disability or disorder.

<i>Journal of the National Cancer Institute</i> Academic journal

The Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) is a peer-reviewed medical journal covering research in oncology that was established in August 1940. It is published monthly by Oxford University Press and is edited by Patricia A. Ganz. It was merged with Cancer Treatment Reports in January 1988. JNCI used to be the official journal of the National Cancer Institute (NCI); however, in 1996, the NCI and JNCI agreed to grow apart. Over the next five years, JNCI became independent of the NCI.

The social determinants of health in poverty describe the factors that affect impoverished populations' health and health inequality. Inequalities in health stem from the conditions of people's lives, including living conditions, work environment, age, and other social factors, and how these affect people's ability to respond to illness. These conditions are also shaped by political, social, and economic structures. The majority of people around the globe do not meet their potential best health because of a "toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics". Daily living conditions work together with these structural drivers to result in the social determinants of health.

Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good quality of life, cure illnesses when possible, to extend life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care, or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.

Ali Montazeri is an Iranian public health scientist at the Health Metrics Research Center of the Iranian Institute for Health Sciences Research. He is editor-in-chief of an Iranian health journal: Payesh and the associate editor of Health and Quality of Life Outcomes and academic editor for PLOS One. He has been three times the director of Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research.

Quality of Life Research is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research into quality of life from a medical and public health perspective. It was established in 1992 and is published ten times per year by Springer Science+Business Media. It is the official journal of the International Society of Quality of Life Research. The editors-in-chief are Jan Böhnke and Claudia Rutherford. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2017 impact factor of 2.392.

References

  1. "Health and Quality of Life Outcomes". 2017 Journal Citation Reports . Web of Science (Science ed.). Clarivate Analytics. 2018.