Therapeutic patient education in heart failure: Do studies provide sufficient information about the educational programme?

Therapeutic patient education programmes on heart failure have been widely proposed for many years for heart failure patients, but their efficiency remains questionable,partly because most articles lack a precise programme description, which makes comparativeanalysis of the studies difficult. To analyse the degree of precision in describing therapeu-tic patient education programmes in recent randomized controlled trials. Three major recentrecommendations on therapeutic patient education in heart failure inspired us to compile alist of 23 relevant items that an ‘ideal’ description of a therapeutic patient education pro-gramme should contain. To discover the extent to which recent studies into therapeutic patienteducation in heart failure included these items, we analysed 19 randomized controlled trials among 448 articles published in this field from 2005 to 2012