The need to have a measure of health program effect that goes beyond traditional output measures (such as number of patients treated) has been a major motivation in the development of generic health status assessment instruments. There has been an increasing
need to rationally allocate health service resources across diverse health programs. Arising from this a number of measures of the broad effects of illness state on a patient's life have been developed with the declared aim of assisting health policy decisions. The Rosser Index has been seen to allow evaluation of health service funding. Gudex (1986) and Torrance (1972) described the development of his health utility approach as a means of measuring health improvement that is disease and program independent, the aim being to facilitate decisions regarding program funding. Similarly Kaplan (1988a) has applied the QWB to develop a General Health Policy Model