RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Do heart failure patients understand their diagnosis or want to know their prognosis? Heart failure from a patient's perspective
JF Clinical Medicine
JO Clin Med
FD Royal College of Physicians
SP 339
OP 343
DO 10.7861/clinmedicine.10-4-339
VO 10
IS 4
A1 P Banerjee
A1 L Gill
A1 V Muir
A1 S Nadar
A1 Y Raja
A1 D Goyal
A1 S Koganti
YR 2010
UL http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/10/4/339.abstract
AB The management of heart failure has evolved to become a multidisciplinary affair. Constraints of time and resources limit the amount of counselling that is given to heart failure patients in hospital and, with the advent of community heart failure specialist nurses, there is a trend to move more of these services into the community. Most heart failure patients are elderly and may find the information given to them, at the time of diagnosis and later on at home by heart failure nurses, difficult to grasp. In this study, patients’ perspectives of a diagnosis of heart failure, their understanding of the diagnosis as well as what being diagnosed with heart failure means to them were recorded. Patients were questioned on whether the news of the heart failure diagnosis was broken to them in a sympathetic manner and how they felt about the information provided at diagnosis.