Fearing their stoma might leak, feeling embarrassed about their body, worrying about becoming a burden to family and friends. These are some of the concerns that affect people with a stoma. Concerns that may even stop them from doing the things they enjoy.  When this happens, quality of life is at risk – and something needs to be done.

Step one to helping people is to identify what causes a poor quality of life. Coloplast’s Stoma Quality of Life tool (Stoma-QoL) is a simple, validated questionnaire that can be used to measure quality of life in people with a stoma – and identify the issues that cause anxiety or concern.

The Stoma-QoL is:

• specifically designed for people with a stoma – all questions are based on input from people with colostomies or ileostomies, focussing on issues that cause worry or unease for these people
• validated – tested in representative stoma populations in different countries
• reliable – weighted to emphasise those issues that are most critical to the respondent’s quality of life
• cross-cultural – translated into 15 languages
• simple – the questionnaire only takes 5-10 minutes to complete

Read more about a new standard of quality of life, how to use the questionnaire and how it was developed. You can also download it for free.