OBJECTIVES: The value set used when calculating Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are most often based on stated preference data elicited from a representative sample of the general population. However, having a severe disease may alter a person’s health preferences, which may affect the appropriateness of treatments. This study aims to model a EQ-5D-5L valuation based on preferences elicited from a sample of patients who have survived a stay in a Danish intensive care unit (ICU) and to compare those to the preferences of the general population. Further, the heterogeneity in the ICU patients’ preferences will be investigated.

METHODS: The present study generates an EQ-5D-5L value set for ICU patients based on a sample of 300 respondents enrolled in two RCT studies at Danish ICUs. To elicit the preferences from ICU patients we will use composite time trade-off following the most recent EQ-5D valuation protocol. The patient-based and the public-based EQ-5D-5L valuations will be compared. Potential underlying determinants of the ICU preferences will be investigated through analyses of demographic characteristics, time since the ICU stay, self-reported HRQoL, willingness to trade off longevity for HRQoL, health state reference dependency, and dimensions where the patient has gained experience in terms of the patient’s own illness.

RESULTS: ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION Written informed consent will be obtained from the patients. The results of the study will be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and presented at national and international conferences. The modelling algorithms will be publicly available for statistical software, such as Stata and R.

CONCLUSIONS: This is the first EQ-5D-5L value set study of ICU patients. A key strength of this study is that we can compare the estimated preferences to those of the general Danish population as we have access to the data of the newly published Danish value set generated from the general Danish population.