Yale University’s health system has established a new outpatient palliative care clinic designed for heart failure patients.
The clinic is located on the Saint Raphael Campus of Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. Current American College of Cardiology guidelines recommend that patients who have advanced heart failure receive palliative care. The new clinic will allow those patients to receive palliative care outside of an inpatient hospital stay.
“For many patients with advanced heart failure, hospice care does not meet their needs until very late in their course,” Dr. Nora Segar, assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine and one of the founders of the clinic, said in a statement. “Instead, by providing early palliative care outside of the hospital, when it’s not a time of crisis, we can help patients accept and cope with their prognosis, manage their symptoms, and continue making plans for the future.”
Close to 6.7 million adults aged 20 or older suffer from congestive heart failure in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease in 2022 was mentioned on more than 457,000 U.S. death certifications. In 2012, heart failure cost the nation an estimated $30.7 billion.
The number of heart failure patients in the United States is expected to rise to 8.5 million by 2030, a 2023 study in the Journal of Cardiac Failure found.
Hospitalization rates have also been rising, according to the study. Hospitalizations due to heart failure reached nearly 1.3 million in 2018, up from slightly less than 1.1 million in 2008. Readmission rates saw similar trends.
Palliative care can help heart failure patients in a variety of ways. These patients often experience severe symptoms that can include shortness of breath, coughing, nausea, fatigue, pain and depression and anxiety, among others, according to the American Heart Association (AHA).
In addition to symptom management, the integration of palliative care into heart failure treatments can help identify patients’ goals of care and establish advance care plans, as well as address their psychosocial needs.
The new clinic will also see patients with other cardiac conditions, according to the Yale School of Medicine.
“Sometimes when patients come to us, they think there is nothing more a cardiologist like me can do for them,” Dr. Michael Beasley, assistant professor of medicine at Yale and a co-founder of the clinic, said in a press release. “But by providing better symptom management and support, we can help them have a more comfortable life, often for quite some time.”
