HIV clinician and researcher Professor Jenny Hoy talks about the benefits of using PozQoL in clinical settings.
Duration: 2 minutes 15 seconds
About Jenny and her work
At the time this video was made, Professor Jenny Hoy was Director HIV Medicine, Department of Infectious Diseases, The Alfred and Professor of Medicine, Central Clinical School, Monash University.
Video transcript
NB: To make it easier to follow, we tidied up the video transcript to remove filler words, like “um”.
‘PozQoL helps health professionals bring patient-centred care to the forefront for people with HIV’ with Professor Jenny Hoy
We have reached the goal of 90% of people with HIV diagnosed and over 90% percent of them linked to care on antiretroviral treatment and over 90% achieving and maintaining an undetectable viral load.
This means that people with HIV can now live reasonably normal lives, although, living with a chronic disease, requiring daily medication — and medication that is now extremely effective and with minimal side effects.
So we now need to turn our focus to ensuring the majority of people with HIV achieve a good quality of life.
Being able to measure quality of life with a tool that has been validated for people with HIV and being able to measure quality-of-life changes over time is the first step for us, as health professionals, to bring patient-centred care to the forefront and consider the outcomes of utmost importance to people with HIV.
Now, these outcomes will vary from person to person over time and having a tool that encompasses physical, social, and functional attributes ensures that we can cover all bases.
When first introduced, our patients needed to complete PozQoL on paper, and this was initially problematic for us here in the hospital clinic that use an electronic medical record, because it only allowed us to scan the results into the medical record.
But in the new year, we’re moving to a new, exciting pilot, where we are hopeful that completion of PozQoL electronically into an individual’s My Patient Portal and automatic download into the electronic medical record in a form that can be compared over time will occur. And this will allow us to follow changes in overall quality of life, as well as the different sub-domains, over time.
I’m looking forward to this opportunity.
