Why the study?
Concurrent implementation of palliative care with GDMT improves quality of life in heart failure more than disease-oriented management alone, but it remains underused.
A joint Swiss working group established a national strategy and priority topics for integrating palliative care into standard heart failure management, emphasizing needs-based rather than prognosis-based assessment.
Supports needs-based palliative integration in HF using ID-PALL/NAT-PD:CH; extends Swiss consensus with implementation priorities for routine care.
Introduction: Heart failure (HF) causes high symptom burden and shortens life expectancy. Implementation of Palliative Care (PC) concurrently with cardiologic guidelines-directed medical therapy (GDMT) improves quality-of-life (QoL) more than disease-oriented management alone but is underused. To facilitate provision of PC for people living with HF, the Swiss Society of Cardiology (SSC) and the Swiss Society for Palliative Care (palliative.ch) have created joint working-group. Methods: Dyads representing cardiology and PC from Swiss HF centres have been identified. Through online voting, workshops and Delphi process priority topics for incorporation of PC into standard care for people with HF have been identified. Results: 18 experts, from 8 Swiss HF-centres identified main topics relevant for implementation of PC in usual HF care: timely recognition of unaddressed health-related needs of affected people and their relatives (using validated assessment tools ID-PALL or NAT-PD:CH at least as the triggers evolve), identifying key palliative interventions for care of people living with HF, identifying strategies to facilitate cooperation between specialist PC and cardiology, defining research agenda to investigate efficacy of PC interventions, quality of care criteria, and outcomes of PC provision in Switzerland. Discussion: Improvement of QoL of people with HF and their relatives could be greater if PC would be integrated in usual care timely. Frequent needs assessment, using validated tools helps to recognize people having unaddressed needs, and helps to replace the outdated, based on risk of dying, involvement of PC. Dialogue between both disciplines is crucial to provide care prolonging life of best quality during the whole journey living with disease.
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Sobański et al. (2025) studied Heart failure (n=18). Integration of palliative care was evaluated. A joint working group of 18 Swiss experts recommends the timely integration of palliative care into standard heart failure care using validated needs assessment tools such as ID-PALL or NAT:PD-HF.
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