Quality of Life in Patients Undergoing Hemodialysis

Quality of life (QoL) is a broad multidimensional concept that usually includes subjective evaluations of both positive and negative aspects of life [1]. What makes it challenging to measure is that, although the term “quality of life”has meaning for nearly everyone and ev‐ ery academic discipline, individuals and groups can define it differently. Philosophers were concerned with the nature of human existence and defined the “good life”, ethicists debated the shift in health-care decision-making for the concept of “sanctity of life” to “QoL” and so‐ cial utility, environmentalists have placed emphasis upon attributes and conditions of the physical and biological environment, economists were concerned with the allocation of re‐ sources to achieve alternating goals, psychologists considered human needs and their fulfill‐ ment, where as sociologists have advanced a social systems approach in which indicators of QoL are seen as variables in the total system and its subsystems. Physicians focused on healthand illness-related variables and nurses, on keeping with the discipline’s holistic ap‐ proach, took the broadest view in defining life quality, yet because of their frequent preoccu‐ pation with the physiological status, they tend to contaminate their operationalization of the concept with disease-specific items [2,3]. And within these disciplines, scientists have de‐ fined QoL from different perspectives, such considerations as objective indicators, subjective view, life goals, needs satisfaction, and components of life. WHO defines Quality of Life as individuals perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns. It is a broad ranging concept affected in a complex way by the person's physical health, psycho‐ logical state, level of independence, social relationships, personal beliefs and their relation‐ ship to salient features of their environment [4,5].