The Impact of Hospice Care on the Prognosis, Quality of Life, and Emotional Well-being of Patients With Chronic Heart Failure.
Ping Liu, Xueyan Liao
PMID 39641528WHAT IT FOUND
For chronic heart failure, adding pain, comfort, sleep, psychological, spiritual and end-of-life education to standard care improved cardiac function, reduced anxiety and pain, and raised quality of life; daily living improved similarly in both groups.
Key findings
01The hospice group received standard heart-failure care plus hospice care for at least 7 weeks.
02After treatment, the hospice group had better cardiac function, lower anxiety, lower pain and better quality-of-life scores than the control group.
03Daily living improved within both groups, but the post-treatment difference between groups was not significant.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was done in one hospital cardiology department, so it may not apply to other settings. It enrolled 144 patients but analysed 120 after 16.67% dropout; patients who could not receive hospice-unit care, were lost to follow-up or died were withdrawn. The paper does not name a primary outcome, so the positive findings are spread across several measured domains. Hospice care was added to standard heart-failure care and was delivered as a bundle, so the contribution of any single component cannot be separated. Patients were at least 50 years old, had heart failure for at least 1 year, and were not in the acute phase or severely impaired, so the study does not address acute or more disabled patients. The paper did not assess long-term effects, health care use or costs.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hospice care alone caused the improvements or that it helps all people with heart failure. The hospice group also received standard heart-failure care, the hospice intervention was a bundle, and daily living did not differ between groups after treatment.