OBJECTIVES: To lower the burden and shorten the evaluation time of patients with chronic diseases before outpatient clinic appointments, in the emergency room, and during regular followups, a short version of the WHOQOL-BREF assessment was developed for patients with major chronic diseases to assess health-related quality of life based on item response theory (IRT) analysis.

METHODS: The proposed assessment has four domains, with three items in each domain. This version was developed based on data from the 2001 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) in Taiwan. In the NHIS, 13,008 Taiwanese participants between the ages of 20 and 65 completed the WHOQOL-BREF assessment. Among the participants, 1,263 individuals (594 females) with major chronic diseases and 7,657 healthy individuals (3,644 females) were included in the development and validation processes. In the development stage, four criteria were used: the corrected itemtotal correlation, backward regression models of the general domains, the outfit and infit mean squares, and the item information. In the validation stage, the reliability was measured according to the person reliability, and the validity was estimated based on the concurrent and discriminant validities.

RESULTS: The findings indicated good person reliability and acceptable concurrent validity with related scales. Additionally, the new assessment distinguished scores between healthy individuals and those with chronic diseases in each domain.

CONCLUSIONS: The proposed short version of the WHOQOL-BREF was reliable and valid. Therefore, this new form is recommended for use in clinical settings.