Researching health-related quality of life at a community level: results from a population survey conducted in Burgas, Bulgaria

Abstract

Researching health-related quality of life (HrQoL) at a community health promotion level is an approach to understand the health inequalities. The objective of this study is to measure the health of a representative sample by conducting a population survey in Burgas by using the EuroQoL EQ-5D-3L questionnaire, and further to assess the influence of socio-economic, demographic and behavioural factors on HrQoL. The relationship between HrQoL and social capital is analysed through a network-based approach. The achieved ambition was to build the public health capacity of the key stakeholders in order to support decision making. A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2011 using a representative sample of the citizens of Burgas (n = 1050, >18 years old). Respondents were selected through the method of two-stage random selection. HrQoL was assessed by the standardized EQ-5D-3L questionnaire. People without any problem in all five dimensions represent only 26.5% (n = 278) of the respondents, whereas 52.2% (n = 548) reported a moderate problem in at least one dimension; any extreme problem reported 11.6% (n = 122) of the respondents. The mean state of health recorded on the Visual Analogue Scale was 70 (SD ±23). There were differences in self-reported health based on the respondent's age, occupation, education, income, smoking behaviour and membership in community groups. People who have hobby and practice sports assessed their health status higher. The results were communicated in a following Delphi-study; a consensus has been reached that the combination of routine measures of health with measurement of self-rated health could provide better understandings of the community health needs.

Relation between Smoking Habits and Self-Rated Health of Older Persons in the Philippines: Evidence-Based Tobacco Policy Advocacy

“…Compared to previous research regarding SRH, a longer educational career (Kim, 2011), fewer symptoms (Jarbøl, 2017), better qualitative sleep customs (Darviri, 2011), deeper social capital (Vankova, 2016), moderate alcohol consumption (Badawi, 2012) and having medical insurance (Kim, 2011) were the same factors associated with better SRH. Regarding smoking, previous studies showed the opposite outcome.…”

EQ-5D in Central and Eastern Europe: 2000–2015

“…Two of them were large European multi-country studies that involved more than one CEE country [45,46]. Overall 152 reports on country level results were obtained: Austria (n=11) [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57], Bulgaria (n=6) [45,46,58,59,13], Czech Republic (n=18) [60,61,45,46,[62][63][64][65][66]20,[67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74], Hungary (n=47) [11,75,76,45,[77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86]…”

“…Among these, we found representative population norms from Hungary, Poland and Slovenia [11,136,149,115,164,180]. Further, local population norm is available for the city of Burgas in Bulgaria [59].…”

Determinants of the quality of life in patients with ischemic heart disease

“…The obtained results can be compared with other studies in Bulgaria. D. Vankova et al (2015) analyze the health-related quality of life (HrQoL) in a representative excerpt for the region of Burgas. Difficulties in at least one of the five dimensions are found it 548 (52.2%) of the respondents.…”

“…The health-related quality of life is a multi-dimensional concept, integrating aspects related to the physical, mental, emotional and social functioning. The main focus is on the consequences of the disease influencing the life standard and health well-being of the personality (4,5).…”