A cost-effectiveness analysis of community nurse-led self-care education for heart failure patients

Background: Community nurses delivering heart failure self-care education improve patient outcomes, but the cost-effectiveness of this type of nurse-led intervention has not been recently established. Aim: To determine the cost-effectiveness of community nurses' self-care education for heart failure patients compared with usual care. Methods: We performed a cost-effectiveness analysis from the perspective of the Italian National Health Service. A Markov model simulated the progression of a cohort of 1000 heart failure patients receiving remote self-care education after hospital discharge or usual care. Outcomes included costs, quality-adjusted life years, and incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. The willingness-to-pay threshold was established at <euro>40,000/quality-adjusted life years. Findings: Over the 20-year time horizon, community nurses' care incurred an extra cost of <euro>1.3 million while gaining 247 quality-adjusted life years compared with usual care, and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was <euro>5490/quality-adjusted life years. Conclusions: The involvement of community nurses in self-care education is a potential cost-effective way of delivering home self-care education to heart failure patients. (c) 2024 Australian College of Nursing Ltd. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).