Although Quality of life (QoL) is often used as a measure of health gain in economic evaluations, not a single study has yet used QoL to monitor population health over time. The goal of this research is to investigate whether QoL has improved between 2001 and 2008 for the Dutch population.
Data from the Permanent Survey of Living Conditions (POLS: Permanent Onderzoek Leef Situatie) for the years 2001 to 2008 containing the SF-12 were used to estimate QoL. To model QoL generalized additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) were used. Multiple imputation techniques were used to deal with the non-response in the POLS survey. In order to put changes in QoL in perspective we combined QoL predictions of the regression models with mortality rates from statistics Netherlands to compute Quality Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE). Results revealed an increase in QoL over time for both genders for most ages. Although these changes appear to be small, they are similar to changes in mortality rates observed in the same period. For a woman/man aged 18 the increase of QoL resulted in an increase of almost a year/half year in QALE.