Nurse Care Improves Heart Failure Patients

U.S. patients with heart failure whose care was directed by nurse managers had fewer hospitalizations than patients who had usual care, a study finds.

Heart failure is a condition in which the heart becomes too weak to adequately deliver oxygen-rich blood throughout the body — over time it can cause a buildup of fluid or congestion in the lungs and body tissues.

Jane Sisk, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and currently at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, enrolled 406 heart failure patients, half African-American and one-third Hispanic, in New York City.

The patients were randomly assigned to a nurse-management group or a usual-care group. By nine months, nurse-managed patients reported only slight limitations in their physical functioning, while self-managed patients reported marked limitations.

After 12 months, when the nurses were no longer counseling the patients, researchers found that the nurse-led patients’ functioning began decreasing at a rate similar to that of patients who had received no counseling at all.

The findings are published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.