The Health Consequences of Injury Questionnaire.
OBJECTIVE
To study the properties of a new survey instrument, the Health Consequences of Injury Questionnaire (HCIQ), for measuring the impact of injury on health and to compare the new instrument with the more detailed, previously developed Quality of Well-being (QWB) scale.


METHODS
The HCIQ is a three-page health status questionnaire, suitable for self-administration. Similar to the QWB scale, the HCIQ measures health on a unitary scale where 1 represents optimum health and 0, death. The HCIQ was developed and studied in representative samples of injured adults from an Australian population. The HCIQ was administered concurrently with the QWB instrument to a sample of injured subjects, and the QWB scale scores were compared with estimated scores from the HCIQ using QWB scale weightings. The reliability of the HCIQ was tested on a further sample of injured subjects using a mailed test-retest design.


RESULTS
Of the 211 subjects in the validity sample, 98 completed both the HCIQ and the QWB scales. The intraclass correlation coefficient for the scores obtained from the two questionnaires was 0.86 (95% CI = 0.66-1.00). The mean difference between the scores was 0.04 +/- 0.09 (SD). The HCIQ had a median completion time of 15 minutes. Of the 129 subjects in the reliability study, 53 completed the HCIQ on both postal administrations. The reliability coefficient was 0.90 (95% CI = 0.62-1.00).


CONCLUSIONS
The HCIQ is a practical and reliable questionnaire for identifying the health consequences of injury that, when used with QWB weights, successfully predicts the QWB score.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001315:Australia / Q000453:epidemiology; D005260:Female; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011446:Prospective Studies; D019057:Quality-Adjusted Life Years; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012494:Sampling Studies; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000150:complications* / Q000453:epidemiology