Les indices de qualité de vie et les politiques publiques: Revue de la littérature et perspectives de recherche. Plusieurs gouvernements et institutions publiques ont développé des indices de qualité de vie, indices statistiques destinés à établir une mesure de la qualité de vie à l'échelon national ou régional. Nous utilisons 14 critères afin de déterminer la validité et l'utilité de tels indices à des fins de politiques publiques. Nous passons en revue 22 des indices les plus utilisés dans les pays les plus divers. Notre conclusion est que beaucoup de ces indices sont efficaces; s'ils sont réalisés avec sérieux, s'ils sont basés sur des séries temporelles et s'ils peuvent être désagrégés au niveau des sous-populations. Cependant beaucoup sont limités selon quatre points de vue: (1) ils varient énormément en ce qui concerne l'amplitude des domaines pris en compte et des définitions données de la qualité de vie; (2) aucun ne distingue les entrées, les flux et les sorties, concepts utilisés en général par les analystes de politiques publiques; (3) on ne voit pas de lien entre les politiques publiques mises en oeuvre et les résultats en termes de qualité de vie; (4) il n'y a pas eu d'études de comparaison d'indices. Nous concluons que ce n'est que potentiellement que ces indices peuvent être utiles pour la détermination des politiques publiques et nous recommandons des recherches afin de les améliorer.

Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is a poor indicator of economic well–being. It measures effective consumption poorly (ignoring the value of leisure and of longer life spans) and it also ignores the value of accumulation for the benefit of future generations. Since incomes are uncertain and unequally distributed, the average also does not indicate the likelihood that any particular individual will share in prosperity or the degree of anxiety and insecurity with which individuals contemplate their futures. We argue that a better index of economic well–being should consider: current effective per capita consumption flows; net societal accumulation of stocks of productive resources; income distribution; and economic security. The paper develops such an index of economic well–being for the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Norway and Sweden for the period 1980 to 1999. It compares trends in economic well–being to trends in GDP per person. In every case, growth in economic well–being was less than growth in GDP per capita, although to different degrees in different countries.

Significance: Wounds of all types remain one of the most important, expensive and common medical problems, e.g., up to approximately two-thirds of the work time of community nurses is spent on wound management. Many wounds are treated by means of dressings. The materials used in a dressing, their microarchitecture and how they are composed and constructed form the basis for the laboratory and clinical performances of any advanced dressing. Recent Advances:The established structure-function principle in material science is reviewed and analyzed in this article in the context of wound dressings. This principle states that the microstructure determines the physical, mechanical, and fluid transport and handling properties, all of which are critically important for, and relevant to the adequate performances of wound dressings.Critical Issues: According to the above principle, once the clinical requirements for wound care and management are defined for a given wound type and etiology, it should be theoretically possible to translate clinically-relevant characteristics of dressings into physical test designs resulting specific metrics of materials, mechanical, and fluid transport and handling properties, all of which should be determined to meet the clinical objectives and be measurable through standardized bench testing.Future Directions: This multidisciplinary review article, written by an International Wound Dressing Technology Expert Panel, discusses the translation of clinical wound care and management into effective, basic engineering standard testing requirements from wound dressings with respect to material types, microarchitecture and properties, to achieve the desirable performance in supporting healing and improving the quality of life of patients.* e.g., in the TIME model -a widely used practical guide to wound management developed by a global team of wound care experts, which relates clinical observations and interventions to the underlying wound pathology in several aspects, including moisture imbalance. 15

The Human Development Index (HDI) uses GDP per capita to measure “command over resources,” which implicitly makes the strong value judgment that inequality and insecurity do not matter. This paper presents revised estimates of the Index of Economic Well‐Being (IEWB) for the United States, the U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden for the period 1980 to 2001 and demonstrates that replacing an index of the log per capita incomes with our IEWB as the “command over resources” component in the Human Development Index (HDI) affects the level and trend of the HDI, even among affluent nations. Because the IEWB recognizes four dimensions of command over resources (Current effective per capita Consumption flows, Net societal Accumulation of stocks of productive resources, Income Distribution and Economic Security), its use has a particularly large impact where underlying trends in these components diverge (e.g. the U.K. or the United States).

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