A new study into the health of people with chronic heart failure suggests more needs to be done to support them to stay well.

The research which surveyed more than 300 heart failure patients has shown that many struggle to manage exercise, diet, and health care appointments – adding to their burden or workload on top of the effects of the condition itself.

Burden of treatment is a term used to describe the amount of work a patient experiences just staying well and managing their health condition. That can include taking medications, booking health appointments, and changing their lifestyle. It also includes the people and places they can access to help them with that work.

A study carried out in Dorset by researchers from Southampton has shown that people with multiple long-term illness can struggle to keep up with all the demands of their care.

The research surveyed 300 people from six GP practices in Dorset over a 2-and-a-half-year period to assess ‘treatment burden’. Treatment burden is the name given to the workload of being a patient and its impact on health and wellbeing. Treatment burden got worse over this time period for almost a third of the patients that took part in this survey. Those whose treatment burden was most likely to get worse were those living more than 10 minutes from their surgery and those with more than five long-term conditions.

COVID-19 has forced rapid, accelerated change within the NHS to embrace digital innovations such as remote consultation and remote monitoring. Remote interactions not only reduce infection rates by reducing physical contact but offer news ways of delivering emergency care.

A COVID-19 virtual ward is one such innovation, and is simply a way for clinicians to remotely monitor patients at home, avoiding the need for attendances to GP practices or hospital.