Key result
Qualitative analysis highlights four key domains influencing palliative care integration in heart failure.
Why the study?
Heart failure requires palliative care to manage symptoms and suffering, but integrating palliative care with clinical care remains complicated.
Integrating palliative care in heart failure faces systemic and educational barriers but can be facilitated by specialized teams, institutional protocols, and early engagement.
May inform targeted strategies for palliative care in HF; leaves open optimal implementation pending prospective studies.
Heart failure is a progressive condition with a high burden of symptoms and clinical decompensations that causes psychological and social suffering, poor quality of life, and limited life expectancy. Therefore, it requires palliative care to control symptoms and signs, but integrating it with clinical care is complicated. We aimed to discuss the limits and possibilities of integrating palliative care in heart failure. This was a qualitative descriptive study. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were carried out between July 2020 and July 2021. We applied the thematic content analysis and the SWOT matrix. Ethical principles were respected. Ten professionals from an Institute specializing in cardiovascular diseases in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, participated in the study, including physicians, nurses, psychologist, and occupational therapist. We identified 4 categories related to intervening factors: the patient's profile, the emotional aspects of professionals facing these patients, the challenges to integrating and sustaining palliative care in practice, and the ways for assistance planning in this context. The existence of a specialized team, the palliative care commission, and the institutional palliative care protocol, aligned with the realistic perception of the assistance, organizational, political, and social problems, may promote the advancement of palliative care in heart failure.
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Santos et al. (2023) studied Heart Failure (n=10). Integration of palliative care in heart failure was evaluated on Perceived limits and possibilities of integrating palliative care in heart failure. The qualitative analysis identified four categories of factors influencing palliative care integration in heart failure: patient profile, emotional aspects of professionals, practical challenges, and assistance planning.
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