About
The Care-related Quality of Life instrument (CarerQol) was designed to measure and value the impact of providing informal care on carergivers. It combines a subjective burden measure that provides a comprehensive description of the caregiving situation (CarerQol-7D) with a valuation of informal care in terms of well-being (CarerQol-VAS). Utility tariffs to calculate a weighted sum score of the CarerQol-7D are also available (see under ‘Valuation sets’).
The instrument can be applied to measure and value the subjective burden of providing informal care, or be included in the ‘effect-side’ of multi-criteria or costs-consequence analyses of interventions aimed at patients or elderly. The CarerQol can also be used in cost-utility analyses of interventions aimed at informal carers.
The CarerQol is currently available in Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Polish and Portuguese. German, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese translations of the CarerQol are made available by ACTIFcare, a European dementia research project. When using the German, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese translations of the CarerQol, please acknowledge ACTIFcare.
The CarerQol is part of the iMTA Valuation of Informal Care (iVICQ) questionnaire.
User conditions
The CarerQol is available for use without prior permission from the authors. Its use is the responsibility of the researcher. Please reference the use of this document in any publication:
Brouwer WB, van Exel NJ, van Gorp B, Redekop WK. The CarerQol instrument: a new instrument to measure care-related quality of life of informal caregivers for use in economic evaluations. Qual Life Res. 2006 Aug;15(6):1005-21. [view]
Comments or questions can be directed to carerqol@imta.nl.