Do existing definitions satisfy clinically relevant health care needs?
Coronary heart disease is increasingly common with advancing age and has a significant impact on daily life. It constitutes a large proportion of the clinical workload for UK general and hospital practitioners, but a range of pharmacological and surgical interventions are available. Our clinical experience led us to suspect that this patient group had specific needs that existing definitions failed to cover. We developed a comprehensive, self-administered needs tool In order to identify cardiac patients’ specific health care needs through patient interviews, expert opinions and literature review and administered this to 240 consecutive patients admitted to an acute cardiac unit. The methodology has been described extensively elsewhere [40] but briefly the needs assessment questionnaire consists of 46 questions in 5-score Likert scale (1 indicates more needs versus 5 with no needs) in five domains of ‘physical needs, ‘satisfaction’, ‘informational needs’, ‘social needs, and ‘concerns’,
