Palliative Care for People With HF

Purpose

Imagine having heart failure, a condition where the heart struggles to pump blood, making daily life hard. People with heart failure often don't feel well and end up going to the hospital a lot. Many of these people could feel better with extra help, but there aren't many programs that offer support beyond usual heart failure treatments. That's where the ADAPT program comes in, which stands for "Advancing Symptom Alleviation with Palliative Treatment." In this program, nurses and social workers call people weekly, helping them manage their toughest symptoms, offering tools to cope with heart failure, and keeping the patients' current doctors involved. We tested this program in a research study with heart failure patients and found that it improved their quality of life and lowered depression, anxiety, and heart failure symptoms. The question now is if the ADAPT program will work in the community, outside of a research setting, so that more people could benefit from it. Specifically, can the ADAPT program work well in new places? Will patients and their families find it helpful? Most importantly, can it help improve the lives of people with heart failure in these new settings? To answer these questions, the study team will work with healthcare providers to 1) ask how to adjust the ADAPT program to work well in various settings (e.g. primary care, heart failure clinic) and 2) use this information to create simple materials and trainings to help them easily provide ADAPT. This will prepare for the next phase of this project to test out the new ADAPT program.