Patient-Reported Outcome Questionnaires to Assess Health-Related Quality of Life and Symptom Impact

This chapter covers, in detail, PROMs for lower urinary tract symptoms, designed to assess HRQoL and symptom bother or impact. The World Health Organisation defines quality of life as ‘an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns’. Condition-specific HRQoL PROMs evaluate various dimensions of a patient's life, e.g., work, sleep, energy, social and sexual function in relation to the health condition as a whole or provide a measure of bother for each symptom they positively identify, and thus rate the impact of each symptom within the whole health condition. Within urogynaecology, there are a number of sensitive and intimate conditions to consider, which can be challenging for patients to articulate, or even disclose.