Examining patient benefit

Healthcare policy, clinical practice and clinical research all declare patient benefit as their avowed aim. Yet, the conceptual question of what exactly constitutes patient benefit has received much less attention than the practical means of realising it. Currently, three key areas of conceptual unclarity make the achieved, real-world impact hard to quantify and disconnect it from the magnitude of the practical endeavour: (1) the distinction between objective and subjective benefit, (2) the relation between individual and population measures of benefit, and (3) the optimal measurement of benefit in research studies. A philosophical understanding of wellbeing is required to clarify these problems. Adopting a rigorous philosophical framework makes apparent that the differing goals of clinicians, researchers and research funders may make differing conceptions of patient benefit appropriate. A framework is proposed for developing rigour in methods for specifying and measuring patient benefit, and for matching benefit measures to different contexts.