Our Legacy

Historically, McGill faculty have been at the forefront of health measurement advancement for more than 50 years.

1975

The publication of the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) by Dr. Ronald Melzack, which offered the first quantitative and qualitative assessment of pain, marks a major advancement in pain research.

1976

Balfour Mount, MD, often cited as the founder of (and tireless advocate for) palliative medicine theory and practice, establishes the first unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. In October, he chairs the first International Congress on Palliative Care attracting 1,800 doctors, nurses, chaplains, researchers, and other health professionals

1992

Dr. Sharon Wood-Dauphinee leads efforts for translation and Canadian validation of the Medical Outcomes Study SF-36.

1994

Sharon Wood Dauphinee cofounds the International Society of Quality of Life (ISOQOL). The official launch of this unique multidisciplinary society was the inaugural annual conference held Feb 3-4, 1994, in Brussels Belgium.

1995

Second Annual Meeting of ISOQOL October 14-17, McGill University, Montreal Canada.

Dr. Nancy Mayo co-authors the first book collating Physical Rehabilitation Outcome Measures: A Guide to Enhanced Clinical Decision Making.

Dr. Robin Cohen and team released The McGill QOL Questionnaire: a measure of the quality of life appropriate for people with advanced disease.

1996

Dr. Sharon Wood-Dauphinee of the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy serves as President of ISOQOL from 1996-1988.

1997

Development and publication of the McGill Quality of Life Questionnaire.

2012

PROMIS Canada initiative is launched at McGill University with the goal of making the U.S. National Institutes of Health PROMIS measures available to Canadian researchers and health care providers.

2013

Drs. Susan Bartlett and Sara Ahmed join as founding members in the PROMIS International, a network of researchers, aiming to translate and culturally adapt NIH Patient Reported Outcomes Information System (PROMIS) into their languages.

November 2013, the first meeting of Canada-PRO in Montreal bringing together PRO developers, researchers, clinicians, regulators, and policy makers from across Canada and the US. Proceeding published in the special edition of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.

2015

Dr. Nancy Mayo serves as Editor of 1^st edition of the ISOQOL Dictionary of Quality of Life and Health Outcomes Measurement.

McGill’s Legacy of Measurement Science

For 15 years, Drs. Susan Bartlett, Sara Ahmed, and Nancy Mayo have been at the forefront of developing new health measures, adapting existing measures to new populations, and optimizing existing PROMs using sophisticated advanced modern psychometric approaches including Rasch methodology and item response theory. While these methods have been used since the 1950s to optimize measurement in education, only in the past 15 years have they been applied to health measurement.