How palliative care can help in patients with Congestive Heart Failure.
An interdisciplinary palliative care intervention in advanced Congestive Heart Failure patients shows consistently greater benefits in quality of life, anxiety, depression, and spiritual well-being compared with standard care alone. Heart failure (HF) patients not only suffer from dyspnea and fatigue as a result of their disease process, but also have a high burden of somatic complaints, including pain, nausea, anxiety, and depression, leading to significant psychosocial distress for both patients and their caregivers. Advance care planning and complex shared decision making become increasingly important as HF progresses, particularly when patients are faced with options such as transplant and mechanical circulatory support, which may not align well with their overall goals or preferences.How we assign meaning to “value” in health care is of the greatest consequence to the patients we serve. We need to be precise and very clear about how we choose to define it.