Palliative care in patients with heart failure

Valentina González-Jaramillo: University Center for Palliative Care, Inselspital University Hospital Bern, University of Bern, Switzerland

Valentina González-Jaramillo is a physician and epidemiologist. After obtaining her MD, she did a one-year program in Clinical Research at Harvard Medical School and obtained her master's degree in Clinical Epidemiology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Then, she moved to Switzerland for her PhD at the University of Bern. In the last five years, her research area has been palliative care in heart failure. She has studied the unmet needs of this population, tools to identify these needs, and the management of cardiac devices at the end of life. She is currently a researcher at the University Hospital Inselspital and lectures at several universities about the pharmacological and non-pharmacological management of patients with advanced heart failure.

Susanna Mak: University of Toronto, Canada

Susanna Mak is a Cardiologist and Clinician Scientist at the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health. She is also the Department of Medicine's Division Director for Cardiology and holds the Nadal Chair for Advanced Heart Failure Research. She completed subspecialty training in the care of advanced heart failure and received her PhD from the Institute of Medical Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her clinical interests concern initiatives to improve the quality of care for patients with acute and advanced chronic heart failure.

Rachel Wells: University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing, United States

Rachel Wells is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As a nurse and Clinical Nurse Leader with over 10 years of clinical experience in cardiac critical care, palliative medicine, and rural health, her research bridges the fields of chronic illness care and early palliative care and is focused on refining palliative care access for underesourced older adults living with serious illness. More specifically, her emerging program of research focuses on the examination of active palliative care intervention elements and optimal dosing of palliative care to develop optimized interventions that uniquely address palliative care needs at the individual level, a novel approach to addressing health disparities in underresourced palliative care populations. Through a series of investigations, Dr Wells and others have examined components of multicomponent early palliative care interventions and confirmed intervention dose relationships with heart failure-related quality of life. She has been involved with a number of federally-, foundationally-funded, and intramurally-funded grants as a PI and Co-I that have involved intervention development and tailoring and clinical trials testing and implementation of models of early palliative care for those living with serious illness and their family caregivers. Dr Wells is regularly engaged in the IMPACT HF group of the Palliative Care Research Cooperative, the Annual Scientific Meeting Committee of the American Association of Heart Failure Nurses, and the Heart Failure SIG of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association, where she has championed efforts to educate nurses to identify, monitor, and intervene early for cardiovascular complications in underresourced populations.