Importance of and Satisfaction with Domains of Health-Related Quality of Life in Cancer Rehabilitation

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Quality of life (QoL) has gained increasing importance in oncology in general, and in cancer rehabilitation in particular. Multiple instruments have been developed to measure QoL. These instruments generally comprise several aspects of QoL, but they do not consider the subjective importance of these aspects. In our study, we assess the satisfaction with such aspects of QoL and the subjective importance of these aspects as well, based on a large sample of participants of a cancer rehabilitation program. The main result was that the subjective importance of domains of QoL is only weakly correlated with the detriments in these dimensions and that health care professionals should also consider what importance the patients attribute to these dimensions of QoL. ABSTRACT: Instruments for measuring health-related quality of life (HRQoL) generally do not consider the subjective importance of the dimensions they comprise. The aims of this study were to analyze the subjectively perceived importance of the dimension of HRQoL and to investigate their relationship to the satisfaction ratings with these dimensions. A total of 1108 participants enrolled in a cancer rehabilitation program were surveyed. Patients rated eight dimensions of HRQoL (physical functioning, autonomy, emotional stability, cognitive functioning, social relationships, vitality, absence of pain, and sleep quality), as well as global health in terms of how important those dimensions are to them, and how satisfied they are with them. The dimensions with the highest importance ratings were autonomy and social relationships. There were only small sex differences in the importance ratings, but younger patients rated health as being more important than older patients did. The correlations between the importance ratings and the satisfaction ratings of the specific HRQoL dimensions ranged from −0.06 to 0.40, and the correlation between importance and satisfaction for global health was 0.01. Importance ratings provide relevant information for health care professionals in addition to the HRQoL assessments in the context of cancer rehabilitation.