Community, health and policy organisations in Australia have
prioritised improving the quality of life of people living with HIV (PLHIV)
in their programs as part of the goals of the National HIV Strategy(1).
Health services and community programs have for many years
recognised the higher levels of reported isolation, depression, and anxiety
among many PLHIV resulting in lower quality of life. This has also been
shown to be associated with difficulties in maintaining treatment and
continuing care(2, 3). There has also been a strong call for quality of life
to be incorporated into the global goals for HIV(4, 5). However, monitoring
quality of life within day-to-day health and community service practice
is challenging. Most current scales are large, restricted in their use,
expensive, or developed prior to the current treatment era.
To this end, HIV community, support and healthcare services in Australia
expressed a need for an empirically validated, short and practical way to
measure quality of life of PLHIV to evaluate the impact of their programs.
The PozQoL study aimed to develop, test and validate such as scale to be
easily incorporated into the day-to-day practice of health and community
services, as well as for the purposes of social research.
