Guidance
This guideline covers diagnosing and managing chronic heart failure in people aged 18 and over. It aims to improve diagnosis and treatment to increase the length and quality of life for people with heart failure.
NICE has also produced a guideline on acute heart failure.
Recommendations
This guideline includes new and updated recommendations on:
- role of the specialist heart failure multidisciplinary team
- diagnosing heart failure and giving information to people with heart failure
- managing all types of heart failure
- treating heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, including people who also have chronic kidney disease
- monitoring treatment for all types of heart failure
- interventional procedures
- cardiac rehabilitation and palliative care
See visual summaries on the recommendations for diagnosing chronic heart failure and for managing chronic heart failure.
Who is it for?
- Healthcare professionals
- People with heart failure and their families and carers
Is this guideline up to date?
April 2023: We have checked the evidence and plan to update the guideline. The update will focus on pharmacological management of chronic heart failure. For more information, see the surveillance decision. See the guideline in development page for progress on the update.
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
This guideline updates and replaces NICE guideline CG108 (August 2010).
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.