Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Jul 2007
Modelling services to meet the palliative care needs of chronic heart failure patients and their families: current practice in the UK.
To describe current provision of specialist palliative care for chronic heart failure (CHF) patients, and explore challenges, referral criteria and recommendations to inform service development. ⋯ Information regarding existing services' challenges, recommendations and referral systems is essential when designing a new service, maximising feasibility and acceptability. This study design is of particular value when descriptions and evaluations of service models are lacking in the literature. The survey gives much-needed depth and detail to the types of services currently providing palliative care to CHF patients across the UK.