Reference no: EM132263974

Assignment: Each person interviewed will be asked to provide quality of life information on a medical condition through a visual analogue scale, a standard gamble and a time trade-off question.

When submitting your assignment, please include:

1. Copies of your visual scales, questionnaires and interview scripts (you may use the ones provided, if you wish).

2. A table listing the relevant rating (visual scale measurement, standard gamble probability or time trade-off ‘B' value) for each person interviewed. Do NOT use the real names of the persons interviewed - assign them a code name or index number to maintain their privacy.

3. A table listing the QALY calculated from the above, using the techniques from Lecture 7.

4. A technical appendix with your QALY calculations.

5. A discussion of your results:

• Were your QALY values close together or far apart?

• Did one method (SG or TTO) provide consistently higher or lower QALY values than the other? If so, how do you explain it?

• Do you think your interviewee's characteristics affected the QALY measures? If so, which ones, and how? (e.g. Age, Gender, Cultural Background, whether they'd experienced the health state before)

• If you were to do this assignment again, what would you change to improve the reliability of your results?

6. A summary of your investigation, and what you learned from it. You should also answer the following question: based on your work in this assignment, which QALY measure do you think is the most reliable?

Steps to Performing the Assignment

1. Decide what health condition you will investigate. This should be the main condition that your health intervention treats. For example, if your health intervention helps people find safe, nutritious food, the condition could be acute food poisoning (unsafe food) or chronic malnutrition (lack of nutritious food).

You must specifiy whether your condition is a chronic (lasts forever) or temporary condition. For the math to work, it is important that this condition be preferred to being dead (there are fates worse than death!) Some examples are listed below, but you are free to choose any medical, mental, social or otherwise health-related condition that is of interest to your group.

2. If you choose a temporary condition, make sure that it is worse than heartburn. You will be using heartburn (acid reflux), with a known QALY of 0.82, as your comparison condition in calculations . If the condition you choose is NOT worse than heartburn, some of the questions in the default questionnaires won't give the right result.

3. Write a description for your chosen condition (and for heartburn, if you chose a temporary health state). This description must be short, easy to understand, and able to convey to the people being interviewed what the condition is like. They must be able to imagine themselves suffering from the condition.

4. Prepare your questionnaires. You may modify the ones provided, or create your own. If you are interviewing people whose first language is not English, it's fine to have your questions in another language - just be sure to provide English translations in addition to the originals when you hand in your assignment.

5. Conduct your interviews and write down data.

6. Perform the QALY calculations (similar to those in Lecture 7).

Information related to above question is enclosed below:

Attachment:- Assignment.rar