http://www.reqol.org.uk/p/overview.html
HEOM 004: Recovering Quality of Life (ReQoL)

March 2017 


The Policy Research Unit in Economic Evaluation of Health and Care interventions is funded by the Department of Health Policy Research Programme. It is a collaboration between researchers from the University of Sheffield and the University of York. The Department of Health's Policy Research Unit in Economic Evaluation of Health and Care Interventions is a programme of work that started in January 2011. The unit is led by Professor John Brazier (Director, University of Sheffield) and Professor Mark Sculpher (Deputy Director, University of York) with the aim of assisting policy makers in the Department of Health to improve the allocation of resources in health and social care. This is an independent report commissioned and funded by the Policy Research Programme in the Department of Health. The research was also part-funded by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care Yorkshire and Humber (NIHR CLAHRC YH). http://www.clahrc-yh.nir.ac.uk.


August 2016 - the ReQoL license is now available, please visit the ReQoL website for more details. 

ReQoL is a new Patient Reported Outcome Measure (PROM) specifically developed to assess quality of life for people with mental health conditions. ReQoL will assess the recovery of the service user in order to evaluate and improve mental health services from the patient’s perspective.

http://www.reqol.org.uk/p/overview.html
Collaboration has been central to the development of ReQoL. There are 4 governance groups in addition to the core team, which have brought together expertise from a wide range of mental-health related institutions and groups to shape the development of the PROM. These groups include academic and clinical researchers and mental health practitioners based in the UK, international  researchers, expert service users, and policymakers from the Department of Health and NHS England.

This collaborative working has ensured that ReQoL is relevant and useful to patients and practitioners, as well as producing data in order to evaluate services and aid future decision making. It has also facilitated study recruitment (over 6500 services users were recruited to test the measure from across England, from 21 NHS trusts, 6 GP practices and a number of voluntary sector organisations), and will aid the implementation process.

The project has been majority-funded by the Department of Health through EEPRU (Policy Research Unit in Economic Evaluation of Health and Care Interventions). The Chief Investigator (CI) for the ReQoL project is Professor John Brazier, who is the lead for the HEOM theme, and another member of ReQoL core team, Tom Ricketts, who is leading the implementation work, is part of the CLAHRC YH Mental Health and Comorbidities theme.

HEOM has contributed funding towards the HEOM006 ReQoL BME validation project, has funded the lead researcher for the HEOM008 ReQoL adolescent validation project through RCF, and is now funding a researcher for the on-going research into implementation work.