suggested that the main goal of healthcare is to improve
patients perceptions of their health and the extent to which
health problems interfere with their QoL [79]. It could be
argued that QoL outweighs simple short-term symptom
reduction as the most important treatment outcome for
ADHD. If a treatment reduces symptoms but does not
increase a child’s QoL can that treatment be considered
effective? Thus QoL, if able to be measured reliably could
be an important outcome measure in both clinical research
and routine patient care. On a more general level the use of
QoL data by individual child and adolescent mental health
services could assist with service planning and audit and
help focus attention on outcomes that patients themselves
feel are important. Taking this one step further the
assessment of QoL across different mental and physical
health domains can allow for direct comparisons to be
made between the impacts of these conditions on either
individuals or populations—which in turn has the potential
to provide an evidence base for a more rational reconsideration of the ways that resources are allocated within
health services than is typically the case. QoL measurement is already acknowledged as being central to the calculation of cost-effectiveness of different treatments and
hence to the choices between treatments, both at an economic level (e.g. reimbursement of drug treatment costs)
and at an individual patient level [21].