The international valuation protocol for the EQ-5D-Y-3L

The EQ-5D-Y-3L is a generic health related quality of life instrument for use in younger populations. Some methodological studies have explored valuation of children’s EQ5D-Y-3L health states. There are currently no published value sets available for the EQ-5D-Y-3L that are appropriate for use in cost-utility analysis. The aim of this paper is to describe the development of the valuation protocol for the EQ-5D-Y-3L instrument. There were several research questions that needed to be answered to develop a valuation protocol for EQ-5D-Y-3L health states. Most important of these were: 1) Do we need to obtain separate values for the EQ-5D-Y-3L, or can we use the ones from the EQ-5D-3L? 2) Whose values should we elicit: children’s or adult’s? 3) Which valuation methods should be used to obtain values for child’s health states that is anchored in Full health = 1 and Dead = 0? The EuroQol Research Foundation has pursued a research programme to provide insight on these questions. In this manuscript, we summarized the results of the research program concluding with the description of the features of the EQ-5D-Y-3L valuation protocol. The tasks included in the protocol for valuing EQ-5D-Y-3L health states are Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE) for obtaining the relative importance of dimensions/levels and composite Time-Trade-Off for anchoring the DCE values on 1= Full Health and 0 = Dead. This protocol is now available for use by research teams to generate EQ-5D-Y3L value sets for their countries allowing the implementation of cost-utility analysis for younger populations