We welcome Marie Curie’s report and call on the government and healthcare bodies to provide better training for healthcare professionals to identify heart failure patients approaching the end of their life and offer them a choice about their care, including where they wish to live their final weeks and days and to die.
Mike Hobday, our Director of Policy, said: “This report reinforces the evidence that heart failure patients are missing out on quality palliative care. We’ve known this for a long time and this must change.
“Our Caring Together
programme in Scotland has shown that it is possible to identify
patients with heart failure who are approaching the end of life phase of
their illness and ensure they are given a choice about their
end-of-life care.
“We want to see
governments and healthcare bodies act now to provide better training for
healthcare professionals to give them the confidence to identify
patients with heart failure approaching the end of life and open up
conversations with heart patients about their end-of-life-care.”
The
BHF, Marie Curie and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde are running a
seven-year programme called Caring Together. It aims to improve the
quality of, and access to, palliative care for any patients in the
advanced stages of heart failure.
There
are an estimated 550,000 people in the UK living with heart failure.
There currently isn’t a cure for heart failure, where the heart muscle
is permanently damaged, most commonly caused by a heart attack.