CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Quality of life assessment has been conducted to many different countries and proven its
usefulness through health care providers to their health compromised patients. This study was
first formulated by the different persona of the World Health Organization year 1995 and has
been effective up to the year 2010. Quality of life assessment has focus on various aspects of the
patients life especially to those affected by certain disease. These aspects are categorized
according to the course of study such as physical functioning, social interactions, and
psychological or spiritual issues. Instead of concentrating entirely on the clinical endpoints such
as morbidity, mortality and length of stay, it caused a great shift of focus to the aspects of
patients life may it be affected by a disease or the treatment of a specific disease. One can direct
its intervention to the medical-surgical condition of the patient, however due to the dynamic
course of the health-disease spectrum, the efficiency of certain nursing intervention may vary
throughout the disease process. It is in this point that assessing QOL can help to direct and
improve nursing interventions and eventually enhance the overall life expectancy of a medical-
surgical patient and/or population. Quality of life is a self-assessment or subjective view of the
patients health and well-being. As a standardized method of measuring the patients status, QOL
assessment offers a patient-centered approach to study the various factors that affect patient-
centered outcomes of the individual or population. This evaluation tools can help monitor
recovery or disease progression, identify factors that influence QOL, and facilitate
communication between the nurse and patient (Velikova et al., 2004).