Support for Heart Failure Patients FAQ
Support for Heart Failure Patients FAQ
HeartCare at Home is a care plan for people living with heart failure. It may help you to stay out of hospital and improve your quality of life.
Managing heart failure is all about regular monitoring and prompt treatment, which can be tricky with lengthy GP and hospital waiting times.
With HeartCare at Home, we’ve eliminated lengthy waiting times – our medical team monitor your heart rate, blood pressure and weight, via our easy-to-use app. If your treatment plan needs adjusting, we’ll get this fixed fast, so that you don’t end up in hospital.
The term heart failure* is used to describe a heart which is not working as well as it should. This can sound quite frightening but it is important to understand that your heart is not about to stop.
It can certainly cause a build-up of fluid in the lungs (lung congestion) causing breathlessness or leg swelling but these symptoms can improve with suitable treatment allowing you to live well with heart failure.
*Reference: The Irish Heart Foundation (irishheart.ie)
You’ll need to enter your measurements twice a week, and complete a symptom checker once a week. If these are staying stable, we won’t bother you.
If we start to see small changes, we’ll contact you within 24 hours to ensure that you stay on track, well before any serious problems arise. You may be asked to input your measurements more often for a few days to monitor you more closely. It’s nothing to worry about, it just helps us to ensure that you stay healthy and out of hospital.
Our existing patients tell us all the time that they really value the support and sense of security that they get from knowing that someone’s watching over them. Research around the world has shown that programmes like this help patients stay out of hospital, so improving their quality of life.
This service is part of a research driven care programme to show that remote monitoring can improve quality of life for heart failure patients, specifically by reducing the number of GP and hospital visits. The study is being privately funded by Centric Health and Roche Diagnostics.
Similar programmes in other countries have already had great results. Once this study is complete, we hope to make remote monitoring widely available across the country.
All patient data is treated with the utmost confidentiality. All research data is pseudonymised before analysis in order to protect your identity. Centric Health is the data controller of all data collected during this programme. If you have any questions regarding this study, you can contact our Data Protection Officer at dpo@centrichealth.ie
Useful Links
Irish Heart Foundation: irishheart.ie
Croi Heart and Stroke Charity: croi.ie