Measuring the effectiveness of heart transplant programmes: Quality of life data and their relationship to survival analysis

This paper explores the problems of benefit measurement in the economic evaluation of heart transplant programmes. We present data from our evaluation of the U.K. heart transplant programmes on both survival and quality of life and we examine the relationship between the two. The quality of life measure used, the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP), is described and results presented. We attempt to aggregate this profile measure into a single index score and combine these data with life expectancy gains to produce estimates of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) gained for heart transplantation. In addition we examine the extent to which pre-transplant NHP scores can be used as predictors of post-transplant survival.