| Sub-theme | Example quotes |
|---|---|
| Clinicians’ experiences using QoL tools in clinical practice | 'I suppose I do use questionnaires. I use mood questionnaires for patients who are depressed or that sort of thing, use that sort of thing … But not for people who are overweight.' (P1, Female, GP)'I haven’t really used them, to be honest. I’m trying to think. The only thing … doing the questionnaire or anything I’ve not used specific quality-of-life tools. The only questionnaire thing I used to routinely give to patients is a PHQ9 about depression, but I don’t routinely use quality-of-life tools.' (P11, Female, GP)'I can’t remember using a quality-of-life tool. I know some exist so there’s the rheumatoid arthritis quality-of-life tool … What I’ve always preferred to use is just general talk and intuition.' (P16, Male, GP) |
| Perceived advantages of QoL tools | 'It will bring up a subject, doesn’t it, so it allows you to explore that subject a little bit more, and thinking about quality of life and maybe how we can improve it.' (P8, Female, practice nurse)'I think they can be very useful because I think they often just start a conversation. They’re a good opener to ask sometimes difficult questions.' (P12, Female, GP)'It’s useful for monitoring patients as well. So even for things like depression and so it’s something that you can work on and you can actually see this is what your score was before, it’s better now.' (P10, Female, GP) |
| Divergent views of usefulness of QoL tools | 'They can do in private and then it’s returned almost anonymously sometimes they can be more honest with their answers.' (P3, Female, GP)'If you’ve got a patient who wants to give an answer that they think the doctor will want or what they [the patient] actually wants to come out of [the consultation] at the end … the tool can actually do more harm than good.' (P16, Male, GP)'Some of them can be very long winded.' (P15, Female, GP)'I find it particularly useful partly because time is very precious in general practice and so anything that allows us to generate structured information that can be tracked over time without picking up a lot of time is helpful.' (P4, Female, GP) |
QoL = quality of life.