Palliative care has the potential to play an important role in relieving suffering and distress for patients with heart failure and their carers, though high-quality evidence is currently lacking.
The aim of palliative care is to improve the quality of life in the broadest sense for patients with incurable disease. It also aims to improve the quality of dying (to achieve a "good" death) and to ameliorate the devastating effect of dying on the family and carers. Specialist palliative care is a young speciality in the UK. Many of the modern concepts were put in place by Dame Cicely Saunders when she opened St Christopher’s Hospice in 1967, creating not only inpatient hospice beds but a large multi-professional home care outreach service
Gibbs et al. (Tue,) conducted a review in Heart failure. Palliative care was evaluated. Palliative care has the potential to play an important role in relieving suffering and distress for patients with heart failure and their carers, though high-quality evidence is currently lacking.