There is currently much interest in the measurement of self reported health status. A number of health status measures have been designed. However, such questionnaires are often long and complicated, or are disease specific. The most famous generic British health status instrument is the...

A recent criticism of the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP) claimed it was an insensitive instrument for use in population surveys, because its modal response was zero, and domains measured by the instrument are insufficiently distinct. It is argued here that the NHP was designed specifically to...

In recent years much attention has been paid to the development of measures of subjective health status yet, although statistical criteria of reliability and validity have been quite rigourously tested, there has been little consideration of the different theories of disability which underlie...

Outcome measures are increasingly used to assess the impact of diseases such as Parkinson's disease (PD) from the patient's perspective. These measures, in the form of questionnaires to assess health-related quality of life (HR-QOL), are of 2 main kinds: generic and disease-specific. The former...

In the last 30 years, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has evolved from an intervention indicated only in cases of acute insult to an otherwise healthy body to a default measure employed in virtually all cases of cardiac failure. The high cost and low efficacy rate of CPR has provoked...

There has been considerable debate over the importance of the health selection hypothesis for explaining social gradients in health. Although studies have argued that it may not be an important explanation of social gradients in health, previous analyses have not estimated, simultaneously, the...

This review outlines the possible uses of subjective health status measures in the evaluation of medical treatment, and possible limitations and pitfalls that potential users of such measures must be aware. Whilst much has been written about the requirements of measures in terms of reliability,...