[Quality of life assessments in clinical practice]

The main objective of a publicly funded health care is to improve the health of the population as much as possible, and to reduce inequalities in health within that population. The traditional medical approach is essential, however there are increasingly demanding explanations as to how the medical care provides health, these explanations must encompass more than laboratory results and clinical opinions. Quality of life represents the functional effect of an illness and consequent therapy upon a patients predicted by the patient, provides information about the physical and social functioning and mental well-being. Chronic diseases are the perfect objectives of quality of life evaluation, since in chronically ill patients the long term health outcomes are the most important as opposed to the short term improvements. The quality of life of these patients in impaired at several points, such as the disease has an impact on psychological functioning, impact on work (school) and every-day life, impact on family life, impact on social functioning and impact on the economical status of the patients. In practice we have a wide variety of potentially efficient heath care activities, drugs that provide an improved clinical status. The core problem is whether the physician and the patient have the same rating for one particular health state. The results of quality of life assessments suggest that, however we have objective and reliable tests to assess the patients health state we can not predict how patients are feeling as a result of an intervention. As assessment of a patients quality of life provides important complementary information and should be measured together with the conventional clinical indices in the everyday clinical practice.