The Stoma-QoL questionnaire was developed in 2001 and used as one of three measurement tools for the Coloplast DialogueStudy – a global clinical study designed to document the real-life experience of our SenSura ostomy appliance.

The Stoma-QoL questionnaire was developed in five phases:

Marslow’s hierarchy of needs

• Identification of basic content for the questionnaire in five areas: food, sleep, sexual activity, relations to family/friends and relations other than family (inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)

Interviews with 169 people with a stoma

• Interviews, based on these five areas, were conducted by nurses with 169 people with a stoma from Denmark, Spain, France and the UK.

Preliminary 37-item questionnaire

• Interview analysis, identifying 37 preliminary topics that had an influence on quality of life. These topics were then structured into questions, translated into Danish, French, German and Spanish and tested for cultural consistency.

Validation of the 37-item questionnaire

• Validation of a 37-item questionnaire in a cross-cultural population. 182 people with an ileostomy or a colostomy completed the questionnaire. All respondents had had their stoma for more than 6 months.

20-items Stoma QoL questionnaire

• Refining the questionnaire into 20 questions, using relevant analysis models. The ‘food’ area  was removed from the questions as the interviews proved that this issue had little or no influence on the respondents’ quality of life.
• Final validation of the Stoma-QoL questionnaire, checking test-retest reliability in the same person, reliability between different people and consistency in different languages.

Learn more
This research article presents the development and validation of Stoma-QoL in greater detail. To learn more about a specific validation process, download the Dutch validation of Stoma-QoL.

Download for free
The Stoma-QoL questionnaire is free, and you are very welcome to download it. To download it, we ask you to fill in a simple form, indicating your nationality and place of work. We use this information only to track the use of the questionnaire.