Acute heart failure: too sick for discharge teaching?

Most patients with heart failure (HF) respond within a matter of hours to days to available medical treatments. Nursing's current challenge in HF inpatient care is their short length of stay and content dense patient education needs. Only 54% of US hospitalized HF patients received all HF-1 mandated discharge education components. By using nursing evidence and adult learning principles, we can transform HF-1 topic descriptions into a "workable" plan for our newly stable HF patients. Pragmatically viewed, we need to turn the 5 key areas upside down to meet our HF patient's needs during early hospitalization: (1) recognizing symptoms, (2) pacing rest and exercise, (3) daily weights, (4) restricting sodium and fluids, and (5) managing medications. This "organizing" issue is important to our success and costly to all those who accepted the published order as prescriptive for their video, audio, and printed discharge education materials.