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Healthier hearts for life: an inpatient support group for individuals with congestive heart failure

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a prevalent disease that leads to frequent hospital admissions secondary to its disabling symptoms (Shafazand et al., 2015). Despite a substantial amount of research available regarding CHF, this disease is still perplexing because it remains one of the most prevalent and costly diseases worldwide (Jonkman et al., 2016; Shao, et al., 2013). Even though many interventions have been researched for CHF, it is often poorly managed. Almost 25% of patients are readmitted to hospitals within 30 days from their initial admission (Kilgore et al., 2017) and approximately 50% are readmitted within 6 months (O’Connor, 2017). Research studies have typically focused on outpatient, home, and post-inpatient settings which neglects the inpatient setting where patients often spend much time. Therefore, this setting should be a focal interest for research. Consequently, the Healthier Hearts for Life Pilot Program was developed to address this gap.
This program is an interprofessional, inpatient support group for patients with CHF that are considered high risk for readmission. This program is led by occupational therapists but involves many other healthcare professionals. The program’s overall goal is to increase participants’ feelings of self-efficacy for managing their CHF by providing participants with education and hands-on learning opportunities. This program adopts a Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1989) lens to understand the problem, while interventions were guided by the Transtheoretical Model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983). Additionally, interventions were based on advantageous, evidence-based findings from the literature of the various medical professions. Overall, this program was designed to support patients to be more competent in the management of their CHF by targeting ‘heart healthy’ behaviors and lifestyle changes in order to reduce readmissions.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/41435
Date26 September 2020
CreatorsLancey, Allyson
ContributorsSlater, Craig E., Jacobs, Karen
Source SetsBoston University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis/Dissertation
RightsAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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