Multidisciplinary palliative care is effective in people with symptomatic heart failure: a systematic review and narrative synthesis

SAGE Palliative Medicine & Chronic Care

This episode features Professor Miriam Johnson (Hull York Medical School, UK). People with heart failure have poor access to palliative care. People with advanced heart failure have poorer access to palliative care than people with cancer and the evidence base in support of heart failure palliative care is less developed. This systematic review draws together the current literature, both observational and experimental, investigating the use of palliative care in people with symptomatic heart failure. The findings support the use of multi-disciplinary palliative care in this patient group, as distinct from single components only, but trials do not identify who would benefit most from specialist palliative referral. There are no sufficiently robust multi-centre evaluation phase trials to provide generalisable findings. Full paper available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269216319859148 If you would like to record a podcast about your published (or accepted) Palliative Medicine paper, please contact Dr Amara Nwosu: [e-mail]