Journal of palliative medicine
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Comparative Study
Supportive Cardiology: Moving Palliative Care Upstream for Patients Living with Advanced Heart Failure.
Heart failure (HF) affects ∼600,000 Canadians and is a chronic, life-limiting illness marked by exacerbations of distressing symptoms requiring acute medical management, typically sought in Canada's emergency departments. HF often has an unpredictable illness trajectory and is a chronic terminal illness with a poor prognosis. Patients living with advanced HF have difficulty in accessing palliative care (PC) supports, which can result in unnecessary suffering as their HF progresses and they near end of life (EOL). ⋯ A PC team was embedded into our institution's existing HF team. Findings show that integration of an embedded model of PC delivery for patients living with advanced HF led to overwhelming positive patient and family feedback while providing timely advance care planning discussions that may be associated with beneficial patient, family, and system outcomes. These outcomes can be used to inform public policy and speak to a cost-effective patient and family-centered approach for providing care to individuals and families living with advanced HF.
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People with serious illness frequently rely on religion/spirituality to cope with their diagnosis, with potentially positive and negative consequences. Clergy are uniquely positioned to help patients consider medical decisions at or near the end of life within a religious/spiritual framework. ⋯ Poor knowledge of EOL care may lead clergy to passively enable congregants with serious illness to pursue potentially nonbeneficial treatments that are associated with increased suffering.