MEASURING HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY-OF-LIFE IN PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC LEGULCERS

Clinicians who work with patients with chronic leg ulceration (minimum duration of 3 months) will have noted the profound impact of this con dition on a patient's quality of life. Research has been slow to ident ify an appropriate tool to measure this dimension for use in clinical management. The goal of this study was to identify the usefulness of t he SF-36 in describing the self-reported health status of patients wit h chronic leg ulceration. A questionnaire was sent to 63 patients atte nding a specialist wound healing clinic at a university teaching hospi tal, and a reminder was sent two weeks later. A 95 percent response ra te was achieved. Analysis using independent t-tests indicated signific ant differences for 7 of the 8 sub-scales (p < 0.001), when compared w ith age-matched norms. These results provide support for the use of th e SF-36 when describing the functional status and well-being of this p atient group. Further research is needed to investigate the sensitivit y of this tool to changes over time for this group and to compare the performance of this tool with a form of outcome measure specifically d esigned for patients with this important clinical problem.