Worldwide economic constraints on health care systems have highlighted the importance of evidence-based medicine
and evidence-based health policy. The resulting clinical trials and health services research studies require instruments
to monitor the outcomes of care and the output of the health system. However, the overabundance of competing measurement
scales can make choosing a measure difficult at best. Measuring Health provides in-depth reviews of over 100 of
the leading health measurement tools and serves as a guide for choosing among them.LNow in its third edition, this
book provides a critical overview of the field of health measurement, with a technical introduction and discussion
of the history and future directions for the field. This latest edition updates the information on each of the
measure previously reviewed, and includes a complete new chapter on anxiety measurement to accompany the one on
depression. It has also added new instruments to those previously reviewed in each of the chapters in the book.LChapters
cover measurements of physical disability, social health, psychological well-being, anxiety, depression, mental
status testing, pain, general health status and quality of life. Each chapter presents a tabular comparison of
the quality of the instruments reviewed, followed by a detailed description of each method, covering its purpose
and conceptual basis, its reliability and validity and, where possible, shows a copy of the actual scale. To ensure
accuracy of the information, each review has been approved by the orignial author of each instrument or by an acknowledged
expert.