Quality of life for patients with heart failure

Heart failure is a condition where the heart cannot pump blood around the body as well as it should. This can cause symptoms such as shortness of breath, fatigue and swelling (primarily of the lower limbs). It can occur at any age but is most common in older age groups; the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) notes that both the “incidence and prevalence of heart failure increase steeply with age, and the average age at diagnosis is 77”. According to the British Heart Foundation (BHF), this falls to “69 [years] for people from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds” while the average is “in the low 60s for some cohorts, including the most socio-economically deprived”.

Heart failure is one of the conditions that is recorded on GP registers in the NHS Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF). Figures from the QOF on heart failure suggest a prevalence of 0.9% (measured against all ages population) in 2019-20. This amounts to 541,000 people in England identified as currently living with heart failure. At the UK level, current estimates suggest that the condition affects 920,000 people across the country.

There are approximately 200,000 new diagnoses of heart failure every year in the UK, with evidence published in 2018 indicating that the “burden of heart failure in the UK is increasing, and is now similar to the four most common causes of cancer combined”. The BHF estimates that heart failure accounts for 2% of the total NHS budget, “with 70% of these costs due to hospitalisation”. In 2019/20 there were 94,185 hospital admissions in England where the primary diagnosis was heart failure.