“How are we doing today?” – Attitudes towards and reality of assessing the health-related quality of life of urological patients in everyday clinical practice

In addition to the "hard" endpoints of recurrence-free time or survival, health-related quality of life is often measured in (uro)oncology as an indicator of treatment success. The national S3 guidelines for "Early Detection, Diagnosis, and Treatment of the Various Stages of Prostate Cancer" also recommend assessing health-related quality of life in routine clinical practice.
Whether the guideline recommendations and scientific calls to address quality of life in counseling are being implemented has not yet been investigated. Discussions among urological colleagues and at urological conferences suggest that a distinction is not made between symptom assessment and health-related quality of life in routine clinical practice, and that the construct of quality of life is perceived as too "abstract" by primarily clinically active colleagues (in contrast to scientifically active colleagues).
By means of a postal survey, the Institute for Clinical Epidemiology will survey a total of ~4,500 urologists in private practice and chief/senior physicians from urological departments/clinics using a 2-page questionnaire on their attitudes towards the assessment of health-related quality of life and ask them about the assessment in everyday clinical practice.
Based on the study outlined here, two currently unresolved, health-related questions can be answered:
(1.) What is the urologists' approach to assessing health-related quality of life?
(2.) Is quality of life addressed in patient consultations? If so, in what form and with which instruments is quality of life assessed, and for what purpose?