Treatment of patients with severe burns-costs and health-related quality of life outcome.

To study the effectiveness of the treatment of patients with severe burns, the authors collected health-related quality of life (HRQoL) data with the 15D instrument, 17 to 29 months after treatment had commenced at the national burns unit. The costs of each patient's secondary care treatment were followed for a mean of 66 months. During the 1-year study period, 107 patients were treated at the burns unit, eight for scar surgery, the remainder for primary treatment of a burn injury; 19 had died or could not be located during the time of the HRQoL survey.

Comparison of two utility instruments, the EQ-5D and the 15D, in the critical care setting.

Purpose: Reliable measures are required for proper cost-utility analysis after critical care. No gold standard is available, but the EQ-5D health-related quality of life instrument (HRQoL) has been proposed. Our aim was to compare the EQ-5D with another utility measure, the 15D, after critical illness.

Health-related quality of life and employment status of liver transplant patients.

Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is one preferable outcome measure of medical interventions such as liver transplantation (LT). The aim of this study was to compare HRQoL of LT patients with that of the general population and to assess the employment status of LT patients. HRQoL was measured with the 15D instrument, a validated, non-disease-specific, 15-dimensional, self-administered HRQoL instrument.