Promotion of Heart Failure Self-Care in the Outpatient Setting

Medical management of chronic heart failure consists of a closely managed medication regimen, cardiovascular testing, interventions, and lifestyle modification, including self-care practices. While medication management, testing, and interventions have concrete guidelines, heart failure self-care education lacks solid guidelines and thus is often poorly defined and variable in practice. Outpatient heart failure treatment typically focuses on medication management more than self-care practices. This project addresses the current lack of heart failure self-care education in the outpatient setting. For this project, a total of seven patients with heart failure with a reduced ejection fraction received a patient survey in order to assess baseline self-care understanding and to identify education needs. A cardiology nurse practitioner provided a brief heart failure self-care patient education session and conducted telephone follow up 10-14 days after the session to assess efficacy of the initiative. Six of the seven participants completed the telephone follow up. Analysis of the patient survey revealed wide variability on heart failure self-care practice and understanding. However, 100% of the participants who completed the telephone follow up demonstrated sustained improvement in heart failure self-care knowledge. Notably, 100% of the participants noted they would be interested in additional in-office patient education sessions. The Promotion of Heart Failure Self-Care in the Outpatient Setting project identifies the need for additional research on the topic of heart failure self-care practices in the outpatient setting and future study on the effects on patient outcomes such as patient satisfaction and hospital admissions