An integrative literature review on nursing interventions aimed at increasing self-care among heart failure patients.

Objective: to analyze and summarize knowledge concerning critical components of interventions that have been proposed and implemented by nurses with the aim of optimizing self-care by heart failure patients.

Methods: PubMed and CINAHL were the electronic databases used to search full peer-reviewed papers, presenting descriptions of nursing interventions directed to patients or to patients and their families and designed to optimize self-care. Forty-two studies were included in the final sample (n=4,799 patients).

Results: this review pointed to a variety and complexity of nursing interventions. As self-care encompasses several behaviors, interventions targeted an average of 3.6 behaviors. Educational/counselling activities were combined or not with cognitive behavioral strategies, but only about half of the studies used a theoretical background to guide interventions. Clinical assessment and management were frequently associated with self-care interventions, which varied in number of sessions (1 to 30); length of follow-up (2 weeks to 12 months) and endpoints.

Conclusions: these findings may be useful to inform nurses about further research in self-care interventions in order to propose the comparison of different modalities of intervention, the use of theoretical background and the establishment of endpoints to evaluate their effectiveness.