Abstract

Alleviation of chronic conditions is an important goal of contemporary health care. Therefore, assessment of patients´ quality of life has gained evergrowing attention. Quality of life is one of the evaluable classes of health outcomes. This article offers an overview of the applications of assessment of quality of life and introduces definitions of generic and disease-specific measures of quality of life. The main approaches to quality of life assessment are described; the theoretical roots, advantages and disadvantages are pointed out. Most attention is given to the health related quality of life and the need-based approach, which are widely used as the fundamentals for development of the measures of quality of life.