Study of quality of life in heart failure hospitalized patients in Kerman medical university hospital in 2008

Heart failure is a chronic and weakening disease. The physical restrictions and advanced symptoms which are derived from this disease cause the decrease quality of life. Since the promotion of quality of life plays a noteworthy role, assessment of quality of life in patients with heart failure, helps nurses to have more doctrinaire surveillances in health - care systems. This is a descriptive-analytic study that has been done on 200 hospitalized patients with heart failure in cardiac and C.C.U wards of Shafa and Afzalipour hospitals (located in Kerman) to study the quality of life in patients with heart failure. General and special standard tools of SF36 was used to assess the quality of life in patients with heart failure. Questionnaires were filled by researcher with interviewing patients. For data analysis Mann-whitney, Kruskal-wallis tests and regression by spss 13were used. The results indicated that women have formed 57.5 percents of affected patients. The average age of patients was 65.43±12.o2. In aspects of quality of life by means of SF36 tool the maximum and minimum point related to mental health and physical problems respectively. The patients who were younger than 60 years old and married had better quality of life. Women had the weaker quality of life in various aspects than men (P<0.05), and illiterate patients also had the lower quality of life. Studying the relation between attendant diseases and quality of life in patients showed that the patients with history of myocardial infarction, unstable angina, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and respiratory diseases and also the patients who had CABG operation had the weaker quality of life. There was not any significant relationship between quality of life and history of cigarette smoking, opium addiction, renal diseased and stroke (P>0.05). On the whole, the results of this study showed that the patients with heart failure haven’t desired quality of life, thus, nurses who works for health service wards should try to obtain all essential basis for appropriate care and necessary possibilities for continuous supervisions, follow up, in order to prepare the conditions for patients to enjoy superior quality of life.