Heart failure and palliative care

de Miriam Johnson, Richard Lehman

"Heart failure is a very common terminal condition, but few heart patients receive proper palliative care. Full of practical, evidence based advice, this new guide encourages a multidisciplinary team based approach to heart failure and palliative care. It stimulates joint working between primary care, cardiology and palliative care teams - raising awareness of the problems associated with supportive and palliative care for heart failure patients. Heart Failure and Palliative Care offers optimum care solutions vital to all palliative care professionals in a wide variety of hospital and community settings. It also provides invaluable advice for primary care, cardiology and other healthcare professionals including heart failure nurse specialists, consultants, and ward nurses. 'Those reading this book will be inspired to look at local ways to address the inequity of access to supportive and palliative care for patients with heart failure. We hope that a future book might describe a very different picture as the research base of symptom control and service provision develops over coming years.' - Miriam Johnson and Richard Lehman. 'Heart Failure and Palliative Care: a team approach is an exciting book. It is exciting for the traditional 'old-style' palliative care clinician (like me) whose practice and expertise is almost entirely limited to end-stage malignant disease. I believe it will also be exciting for cardiology clinicians. It will liberate them (if liberation is needed) from the narrow 'bio-medical' model of disease management, and enable them to adopt a more holistic patient-centred approach. This means that the focus will be on a PERSON with heart failure, rather than a person with HEART FAILURE. On paper this may seem a small difference but in practice the change of focus has a big effect.' - Robert Twycross, in the Foreword." -- Pub.