Adaption and development of a condition-specific quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) tariff in burn injury that spans all ages

Thousands of people, including approximately 6,000 toddlers and children in England and Wales, suffer burns and scalds each year.1 These injuries can be unpleasant and scarring, not only physically, but socially and emotionally. Existing generic QALY measures are very broad and appear to miss relevant and important domains such as physical, social and psychological responses to scarring and stigma.2,3
There's a need to assess the longer-term impact of an injury, including the impact in adulthood of burns that are sustained as a child. Currently, the only way to deal with this is to use multiple generic outcome measures with a lack of comparability over these different phases of life.