EuroQol Academy 2023, Milan, Italy

The 7th EuroQol Academy 2023 will be held in Milan, Italy on 7-9 March at the Melia Milano Hotel.

The main objective of this meeting is to provide open sessions to EuroQol members and presenting author of accepted abstracts that relate to EQ Group’s ongoing research agenda. The theme of this year’s meeting is:

From cradle to grave: can we measure and value HRQoL consistently over the lifespan?

The EuroQol Research Foundation is in a unique position to explore possibilities for providing a suite of coherent, linked instruments which cover HRQoL ‘from the cradle to the grave’. The EuroQol Group has a portfolio of instruments that enable HRQoL to be measured and valued across the entire lifespan, with both EQ-5D-3L and EQ-5D-5L targeting at adults; both EQ-5D-Y-3L and EQ-5D-Y-5L targeting at children and adolescents 8 to 15 years and proxy versions extend this age range further down. EQ-TIPS targeting at infants and toddlers aged 0 to 3 years. Work on how well EQ-5D works in elderly is underway. This suite of instruments allows for the monitoring of health across the lifespan, as well as the calculation of QALYs in populations of all age groups.

However, challenges remain:

• we are also considering questions raised by differences in the measurement of health before and after the change-over to a new instrument;
• using age-appropriate instruments may improve measurements within an age group but produce discontinuities in the results across age group;
• whether the efforts we are making now to include children need to be matched by equally strong efforts to include elderly;
• in both children and elderly, can we use proxy as a valid measure of HRQoL;
• the elicitation and use of age-specific values etc.