The impact of COVID‐19 on the management of heart failure: a United Kingdom patient questionnaire study

  1. Rajiv Sankaranarayanan
  2. Nick Hartshorne‐Evans
  3. Sam Redmond‐Lyon
  4. Jill Wilson
  5. Hani Essa
  6. Alastair Gray
  7. Louise Clayton
  8. Carys Barton
  9. Fozia Z. Ahmed
  10. Colin Cunnington
  11. Duwarakan K. Satchithananda
  12. Clare L. Murphy

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Abstract

Aims

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic has created significant challenges to healthcare globally, necessitating rapid restructuring of service provision. This questionnaire survey was conducted amongst adult heart failure (HF) patients in the United Kingdom (UK), to understand the impact of COVID‐19 upon HF services.

Methods and results

The survey was conducted by the Pumping Marvellous Foundation, a UK HF patient charity. ‘Survey Monkey’ was used to disseminate the questionnaire in the Pumping Marvellous Foundation 's online patient group and in 10 UK hospitals (outpatient hospital and community HF clinics). There were 1050 responses collected (693/1050—66% women); 55% (579/1050) were aged over 60 years. Anxiety level was significantly higher regarding COVID‐19 (mean 7 ± 2.5 on anxiety scale of 0 to 10) compared with anxiety regarding HF (6.1 ± 2.4; P  < 0.001). Anxiety was higher amongst patients aged ≤60 years about HF (6.3 ± 2.2 vs. 5.9 ± 2.5 in those aged >60 years; P  = 0.005) and COVID‐19 (7.3 ± 2.3 vs. 6.7 ± 2.6 those aged >60 years; P  < 0.001). Sixty‐five per cent of respondents (686/1050) reported disruption to HF appointments (cancellation or postponement) during the lockdown period. Thirty‐seven per cent reported disruption to medication prescription services, and Thirty‐four per cent reported inability to access their HF teams promptly. Thirty‐two per cent expressed reluctance to attend hospital (25% stated they would only attend hospital if there was no alternative, and 7% stated that they would not attend hospital at all).

Conclusions

The COVID‐19 pandemic has caused significant anxiety amongst HF patients regarding COVID‐19 and HF. Cancellation or postponement of scheduled clinic appointments, investigations, procedures, prescription, and monitoring services were implicated as sources of anxiety.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.03.20205328: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1002/ehf2.13209
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.10.03.20205328v1 on medRxiv