Palliative Care for Patients With Heart Failure: An Integrative Review

Abstract

Palliative care should be integrated into routine disease management for all patients with serious illness, regardless of settings or prognosis. The purposes of this integrative review were to identify the features of randomized controlled trials for adult patients with heart failure and to provide basic references for the development of future trials. Using Whittemore and Knafl's integrative literature review method, comprehensive searches of the PubMed, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, EMBASE, and Korean databases were conducted, integrating keywords about heart failure and palliative care interventions. Quality appraisal was assessed using Cochrane risk-of-bias tools. In total, there were 6 trials providing palliative care interventions integrating team-based approaches between palliative care specialists and nonpalliative clinicians, such as a cardiologist, cardiac nurse, and advanced practice nurse across inpatient and outpatient settings. The different types of interventions included home visits, symptom management via phone calls or referral to a specialist team, and the establishment of treatment planning. Patient-reported outcome measures included positive effects of palliative interventions on symptom burden and quality of life. Given that most of the selected studies were conducted in Western countries, palliative care should be culturally tailored to assist heart failure patients worldwide.