Metcalfe R: Valuing health: a brief report on subjective well-being versus preferences. Med Decis Making 2012

Health care can improve people’s quality of life,and it can help them live longer. The quality-adjusted-life-years (QALYs) approach has been developed to express these twin components of ben-efit (quality and quantity of life) in a single number. It expresses different health states on a scale between 0 for death and 1 for full health and then multiplies these values by how long the states last. One QALY is equivalent to 1 year of life in full health.1 By comparing how many QALYs different interventions are expected to generate with how much those interventions are expected to cost, it is possible to show the cost-effectiveness of different uses of resources. In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommend