Can Social Care Needs and Well-Being Be Explained by the EQ-5D? Analysis of the Health Survey for England.

BACKGROUND: The recent shift to an integrated approach to health and social care aims to provide cohesive support to those who are in need of care, but raises a challenge for resource allocation decision making, in particular for comparison of diverse benefits from different types of care across the two sectors.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the relationship of social care needs and well-being with a generic health status measure using multivariate regression.

METHODS: We empirically compared responses to health and well-being measures and social care needs from a cross-sectional data set of the general population (the Health Survey for England). Multivariate regression analyses were conducted to examine whether social care needs measured by the Barthel index can be explained by health status as captured by the EuroQol five-dimensional questionnaire (EQ-5D) and two well-being measures-the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12).

RESULTS: Our study found that poor overall scores for EuroQol visual analogue scale, EQ-5D index, GHQ-12, and WEMWBS indicated a need for social care. Investigation of the dimensions found that the EQ-5D dimensions self-care and pain/discomfort were statistically significantly associated with the need for social care. Two dimensions of the WEMWBS ("been feeling useful" and "had energy to spare") were statistically significantly associated with the Barthel index, but none of the GHQ-12 dimensions were.

CONCLUSIONS: The results show that the need for social care, which is dependent on the ability to perform personal day-to-day activities, is more closely related to the EQ-5D dimensions than the well-being measures WEMWBS and GHQ-12.