Mortality and morbidity are no longer the only relevant measures of success for preventive and curative health care, because quality of life and the value that people place on their state of health play to an ever greater extent a decisive role in the decision-making process concerning preventive and curative health care. The aim of the academic discipline ‘quality of life’ (QoL) is to study the relationship between people’s quality of life and their health and to make it possible to measure that relationship. It is important to identify the relevant determining factors and to develop cost-effective, evidence-based interventions to secure and improve the quality of life. It has recently been proposed that quality of life should be considered as a model instead of a concept. Problems of definition are part of the past and the issue of considerable nuancing in existing measurement instruments is giving way to the theoretical modelling of the determinants of QoL.