This book is about the lives of patients, about the health and social care services provided to
help them, and about ways of examining the impact these services make on them. Based on
the authors' experience of using and developing a particular operational measure, the
Lancashire Quality of Life Profile, which has been used successfully in many different
studies and countries, it provides managers and practitioners in mental health with valuable
normative data, insights and ideas about the role of QOL in service evaluation.

Quality of life is an area of increasing interest for health and social care researchers, as it
represents the outcomes of interventions which have most meaning for individuals affected.
However, the concept is not straightforward; objective and subjective definitions compete for
validity, whilst some argue that quality of life is so vague as to be almost useless,'given that
over 2000 years of philosophical investigation has brought us no nearer a consensus view
of what constitutes the good life'(Oliver et al., 1995, p. 3). Even the holders of this viewpoint …