UPDATE 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.

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.