In line with international trends, Quality of Life (QOL) has become an integral part of Hong Kong society, particularly in the past two decades. Quality of Life is a broad concept, and hence, represented by a surge of interest and activities related to QOL from diverse disciplines, different sectors and a wide range of people from the Hong Kong community, who seek to understand and improve the life quality of people with health concerns within the Special Administrative Region (SAR).

The Hong Kong Society for Quality of Life (HKSoQOL) is a non-profit making organization consisting of members who are interested in the study on quality of life. We promote the application of informed knowledge of QOL to enhance services and policy development in public health, medical, rehabilitation and the social service sectors.

The core concern of the Society lies within the area of health. A wide membership from different disciplines is invited to promote interdisciplinary collaborations and exchanges for achieving the mission of the Society.

A distinct milestone of the QOL movement in Hong Kong was marked by the active promotion of QOL within health care, by the medical profession, in 1995. This comprised the Hospital Authority (HA) and a Working Group of health professionals employed under HA. In a joint collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), the first one-day QOL symposium for health professionals was held in September 1995. Since then, the Hospital Authority has continued to conduct these QOL symposiums, approximately every 2 years. These have evolved to include workshops, joint collaborations with health authorities from Mainland China, and increasingly contributions from local and overseas speakers and participants who are not members of the Hospital Authority. These events have also witnessed an increasing number of paper presentations on QOL and participants. In the QOL symposium held in January 2003, more than 300 participants attended this four-day event.

Over this period, there have been other separate, robust, but sporadic QOL activities within the non-medical fields in Hong Kong such as within the social and behavioural sciences, political science, statistics and economics. These have come from the different universities, with members representing different fields of QOL interest and studies, some of which are not coined as ‘QOL’. These institutions have generated an increasing number of research papers and publications on QOL, and held separate research meetings and conferences related to QOL, which have less of an exclusive emphasis on health.

Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in the QOL development between these groups, as evidenced in increasing multi- and inter-disciplinary QOL research and activities. The proliferation of QOL activities from these groups have laid important milestones in Hong Kong, such as the establishment of culturally-sensitive knowledge on QOL and the Hong Kong society, and the development of culturally-appropriate QOL measures. Particularly from the health and social service sectors, these have also comprised the application of QOL as an outcome indicator of interventions and services, and the promotion of QOL in service delivery.