Methods to assess the humanistic outcomes of clinical pharmacy services

This paper describes selected scientific principles involved in the design of patient self-administered questionnaires to assess functioning and overall well-being. It gives several examples of successful uses of patient surveys and suggests possibilities for the use of the results by pharmacists in clinical care. The patients' point of view about their health status is important for the decision-making about treatment choices and as a monitoring parameter for effectiveness or toxicities. Pharmacists should approach the creation of new questionnaires or the results from untested questionnaires with caution and respect. The use of results from proven and reliable individual patient surveys will benefit from the evolution of computer adaptive testing. However, the immediate use of individual health status surveys is not discounted, provided that they accompany clinical data in decision processes.