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 | health surveys | how and why
Physical and mental health scores explained
The SF-36 enables people to describe their health status from their own perspective. The SF-36 can be used to compare the health status of different patients with the same condition or treatments to the health status of the general UK population.
The SF-36 questionnaire is divided into a series of health and wellbeing categories and the answers are plotted on a 100-point scale. High scores equate to good health, low scores to poor health.
Analysing the results gives both summary information on physical and mental health after a treatment and specific health outcomes for a range of sub-categories.
Physical Health
Sub-categories:
- Limitations in physical activities because of health problems - this sub-category is about whether there are specific movements or actions that you cannot do because of your health problem, like climbing stairs or putting on tights because of stiffness
- Limitations in everyday activities because of physical health problems - this sub-category is about whether there are whole activities that you cannot do because of your health problems, for instance being unable to go into the town centre to go shopping because there are few public toilets and you might get caught short
- Bodily pain
- General health perception.
Mental Health
Sub-categories:
- Mental health (levels of psychological stress and anxiety) - this sub-category is about how people are feeling. High scores indicate feeling happy, peaceful and calm and low scores reflect feeling nervous and depressed
- Social functioning (limitations in social activities because of physical or emotional problems) - this sub-category is about whether people feel able to join in the activities with their family and friends that are expected of them
- Emotional role (limitations in everyday activities because of emotional problems) - this sub-category is about whether emotional problems are limiting everyday activities or work
- Vitality (energy levels and fatigue) - this sub-category gives an indication of how much zest for life people have.
What does the information look like?
Combining all the results for a particular treatment provides a rich picture of how people rate their health and quality of life before and after treatment. This picture is described in a series of graphs. The following is an example of overall physical health status for transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP):
From the overall results for physical health status, we can see that people tend to feel worse three months after the operation than before they underwent treatment. However, they still feel in better physical shape than men of a similar age in the UK population.
And, from the sub-categories in physical health and mental health status, we can make more detailed observations about people's experience of treatment. We summarise these findings in the form of summaries or bullet points. For example:
Although prostatism is not a characteristically painful problem, in the sub-category of bodily pain there was a 2.5-point average improvement after surgery. |
In the sub-category of social functioning after surgery, there was an average improvement of 3.5 points. We interpret this as showing that, at three months after the treatment, men are more able to be out-and-about. For example, they may be enjoying social activities that they had been forced to curtail before such as dog walking, playing a round of golf or meeting with friends. This may well be because they no longer feel the need to be near to a toilet because of frequency and urgency, and are no longer embarassed by dribbling after they thought they'd finished peeing. |
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