PhD defence M.S. (Martijn) Visser

Dissertation in short:

The goal of every healthcare professional should be to improve the quality of life (QoL) of his or her patients. Ophthalmic diseases are generally not lifethreatening, which makes ophthalmology an area in health that should perfectly suit QoL research. Integrating QoL into ophthalmic care is not as common as one might expect. The outcomes of interventions in ophthalmology are most often expressed in medical terms which focus on clinical visual and refractive outcomes or on the incidence of complications rather than on their meaning for QoL. In other words, the patient is not asked what he or she thinks about the outcome of treatment. This observation does not imply that medical outcomes should be
devalued or replaced by QoL measures, but rather that the latter outcomes must be seen as additional to the more familiar medical outcomes. Nevertheless, for now, we can state that the assumption that all ophthalmologists are quality-of-life experts is incorrect, since some measurements undertaken have not met the aims claimed for them. This thesis focuses on the enhancement of QoL measurement in ophthalmology.