Health status is usually defined as functional capacity or physiologic functioning. Yet confusion between this concept and quality of life has plagued the quality of life literature for the past decade. This confusion began primarily when funding agencies began to require quality of life measures. Researchers took health status, disease symptom, and functional questionnaires, renamed them quality of life or health-related quality of life and administered them because they were already available. Most of these existing health status questionnaires reflect the dominance of the medical model that stresses ability to perform.
In order to retain the measurement of disease and functional status appropriate to a medical context but add aspects of human life also important to patients, the term health-related quality of life (HRQOL) was coined. HRQOL is “the value assigned to duration of life as modified by the impairments, functional states, perceptions, and social opportunities that are influenced by disease, injury, treatment or policy” (Patrick & Erickson, 1988).
"Medicine cannot by itself determine the quality of life. It can only help people to achieve the state of health that enables them to cultivate the art of life--but in their own way (Dubos, 1976, p. 9.
Discussions of the confusion around the definitions of health status and quality of life can be found in Anderson & Burckhardt, Gill & Feinstein (1994) and Leplege & Hunt (1997). A recent meta-analysis has shown that quality of life and health status are distinct concepts (Smith, Avis & Assmann, 1999).
Last updated 5 September 2000