An assessment of the impact of developmental dysplasia of the hip on patients' wellbeing CALCULATION OF DISABILITY WEIGHT AND COUNTRY- SPECIFIC UTILITY WEIGHTS

Aims Within healthcare, several measures are used to quantify and compare the severity of health conditions. Two common measures are disability weight (DW), a context-independent value representing severity of a health state, and utility weight (UW), a context-dependent meas-ure of health-related quality of life. Neither of these measures have previously been deter-mined for developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH). The aim of this study is to determine the DW and country-specific UWs for DDH. Methods A survey was created using three different methods to estimate the DW: a preference rank-ing exercise, time trade -off exercise, and visual analogue scale (VAS). Participants were ful-ly licensed orthopaedic surgeons who were contacted through national and internation-al orthopaedic organizations. A global DW was calculated using a random effects model through an inverse-variance approach. A UW was calculated for each country as one minus the country-specific DW composed of the time trade -off exercise and VAS. Results Over a four -month period, 181 surgeons participated in the survey, with 116 surgeons in-cluded in the final analysis. The global DW calculated to be 0.18 (0.11 to 0.24), and the country-specific UWs ranged from 0.26 to 0.89. Conclusion This is the first time that a global disability weight and country-specific utility weights have been estimated for DDH, which should assist in economic evaluations and the development of health policy. The methodology may be applied to other orthopaedic conditions.