Cardiac impairment or heart failure?: What do patients really think?

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7516.577-c

BMJ 2005;331:577 (10 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7516.577-c

Letter

Cardiac impairment or heart failure?

What do patients really think?

The first 100% of the full text of this article appears below.

EDITOR—The editorial by Lehman et al debates renamingheart failure.¹ We agree from our research that many patientsdo not understand what the term heart failure means. We believethat it would be a shame to substitute the word "heart" with"cardiac": this may cause more confusion as many patients maynot know what the word cardiac means.

We interviewed 40 patients from around the country at differentstages of heart failure, and many of them discussed their confusionabout the meaning of heart failure—several said that theword failure was unhelpful (these interviews can be seen onwww.dipex.org/heartfailure).

Before officially renaming, it might be helpful to have a widerdebate about this and ask patients for their opinions.

Kate H Field, senior qualitative researcher

kate.field@dphpc.ox.ac.uk
Department of Primary Care, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF

Ann McPherson, part time lecturer

Department of Primary Care, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF

Competing interests: Both authors have done research on heartfailure in 2003 for DIPEx, University of Oxford.