Improving quality of life and decreasing readmissions in heart failure patients in a multidisciplinary transition-to-care clinic

Transitional Care Interventions for Patients with Heart Failure: An Integrative Review

“…All studies conducted transitional care interventions for patients with HF. Regarding research design, there were 10 RCTs [16,21,22,24,28,29,32,33,36,38], two quasi-experiments [23,40], two pre-and post-tests [17,26], six cohort studies [18,19,27,34,35,37], and five prospective studies [20,25,30,31,39]. Although it was necessary to establish controls to verify the effects of transitional care interventions, in six of the 25 studies [17][18][19][20]26,39], there was no comparative control group set up to verify the effectiveness of transitional care interventions.…”

“…Regarding research design, there were 10 RCTs [16,21,22,24,28,29,32,33,36,38], two quasi-experiments [23,40], two pre-and post-tests [17,26], six cohort studies [18,19,27,34,35,37], and five prospective studies [20,25,30,31,39]. Although it was necessary to establish controls to verify the effects of transitional care interventions, in six of the 25 studies [17][18][19][20]26,39], there was no comparative control group set up to verify the effectiveness of transitional care interventions. In 15 of the 25 studies, the primary intervention providers were nurses [16,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][28][29][30]32,33,37,38], including advanced practical nurses, clinical nurse specialists, research ...…”

“…Of the eight RCTs, seven satisfied all quality appraisal criteria and one showed a higher dropout rate in the control group than in the intervention group, resulting in mortality bias [16]. Of the 15 quantitative non-randomized studies, 13 met all quality appraisal criteria, one showed a rate of complete outcome data of <80% [17], and another lacked inclusion and exclusion criteria for participant selection [18]. Of the two quantitative descriptive studies, one satisfied all criteria [19] and the other lacked criteria for the risk of non-response bias; moreover, the authors did not balance for any potential confounding factors such as patient age, level of education, or duration of HF [20].…”

“…Subjects presented with various HF types: two studies reported on end-stage HF [28,32], three on chronic HF [16,23,33], two on congestive HF [21,37], one on decompensated HF [29], and the remaining 17 on HF [17][18][19][20]22,[24][25][26][27]30,31,[34][35][36][38][39][40]. To identify HF severity, we considered the New York Heart Association (NYHA) class and left ventricle ejection fraction (LVEF).…”

“…Only 10 of the 25 studies reported NYHA class or LVEF [16,19,21,22,24,28,29,34,36,40]. One study reported B-type natriuretic peptide level >200 ng/mL [25], and two studies reported HF with reduced or preserved ejection fraction [17,18]. The remaining 12 studies [20,23,26,27,[30][31][32][33]35,[37][38][39] did not report the participants' severity of HF.…”