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The measurement of children's quality of life has an important role to play in improving their experience of health and social services, and in promoting a child‐centred approach to service provision. This article provides a rationale for both the development of robust quality of life measures specifically for children and also the use of these measures in assessing the effectiveness of treatments and policy changes. It highlights recent advances in the development of quality of life measures and provides examples of two instruments that have incorporated these steps to produce reliable and valid measures that are not only comprehensible to children of different age groups, but also meaningful to parents and health professionals. The challenge of matching statistically significant change in quality of life to changes of perceived importance to the individual is also discussed in the light of the advantages to be gained from the increased uptake within health and social care of quality of life measures for children.

AbstractThis paper addresses the challenge of reducing HIV infection through creating AIDS‐competent societies. A working model is presented based on extensive international practical experience pooled by facilitators in 10 African countries and Thailand. The main underlying theme is that community members can be empowered to develop their own individual and collective plans of action that will: (i) reduce the likelihood of them becoming infected by HIV; (ii) maintain the quality of their lives through appropriate care and support to those who are infected, and to those who have developed AIDS and their families; and (iii) become autonomous, by monitoring and evaluating their progress in becoming fully AIDS‐competent and learning from each other about how best to move forward in this process, using methods and a strategy that is acceptable to the wider community. A further component of the working model would be the inclusion of People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA) in such activities. This successful bottom‐up process is permeating upwards from the grassroots to professionals in many sectors at district and national levels. It promises to provide a powerful, tailor‐made method for the containment of HIV infection. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.