Quality assurance in quality of life assessment—measuring the validity of the King’s Health Questionnaire

Abstract

The King's Health Questionnaire (KHQ) is a disease-specific, self-administered questionnaire designed to assess the impact of urinary incontinence on quality of life (QOL) in women. To our knowledge there are no data on women's perception of completing the KHQ. Do they feel the KHQ to be useful and valuable or do they feel it to be too burdensome to be used in clinical practice? Therefore, we designed this study to evaluate patients' perception of the KHQ using QQ-10. The QQ-10 is a validated tool designed to measure patient's views on questionnaires. This was a prospective observational study conducted at a tertiary referral teaching hospital. Patients were recruited from a one-stop urodynamics clinic. The study participants were asked to complete QQ-10 to give their views regarding KHQ. This produces two responses: positive value (communication, relevance, ease of use, comprehensiveness, enjoyableness, willingness to repeat) and negative burden (over-long, embarrassing, complicated, and upsetting). Mean scores and standard deviation for positive and negative responses were calculated The KHQ was found to have a high mean value (73; range 13-100) and a low mean burden (25; range 0-81) regarding responses to individual QQ-10 items. This was reinforced by the positive comments provided in the text boxes. Women perceived the KHQ as a valuable tool in their assessment without being bothersome.