Heart patients ‘miss out on palliative care’

MORE THAN 60,000 people die of heart failure each year – but just four per cent get specialist palliative care, according to a new report.

Too few are being referred to hospices because of misunderstandings, not just by the public and patients, but also doctors and nurses, researchers say.

“Palliative care and hospice care are quite loaded words. In people’s minds it is saying ‘dying probably this moment of cancer’,” said Prof Miriam Johnson, director of the Woolfson Palliative Care Research Centre at the University of Hull.

Prof Johnson, who led the project for Hospice UK and the British Heart Foundation, said people feared palliative care meant stopping treatment, when both should work alongside each other: “Heart disease is so up and down, people can live with it for several years, come close to death and bounce back. Some clinicians won’t refer until they are sure a patient is dying when they should be referring when there are problems and they are interfering with people’s living.

“There is so much we can offer from palliative care teams when working alongside cardiac teams. It is not an either-or.”

A study found that nearly half of people dying of cancer were on a specialist palliative care register, compared to just seven per cent of those with heart failure. Of those a third were in the last week of life, which was “too little, too late”.

Although there was a long way to go before heart patients got the same deal as those with cancer, things were “definitely improving”. “Hats off to Marie Curie, who said they would support people with any terminal illness. That was a huge step forward,” she said.