heart failure: do it my weigh....

Whenever people are discharged from the hospital after having had a flare or "exacerbation" of heart failure, they are asked to weigh themselves daily. When they go to rehab or nursing care facilities, the staff are asked to weigh the person daily. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, this doesn't get done, which as a doctor, I find completely mysterious. I was frustrated by this as a resident in training, and I am still frustrated by it today. Again today, I visited a woman out of the hospital for 3 weeks, who has atrial fibrillation (which makes the heart beat irregularly), who is being treated for congestive heart failure, and this one very simple way of tracking how things are going was simply not done during this entire time by the staff in the residential care facility where she is staying temporarily. despite being clearly written on her discharge instructions. Her ankles were getting more swollen, which the staff though was just due to her spending more time upright in a chair. The only way of knowing would be to have those daily weights....

One doesn't need a medical scale or to be 100% precise, but one does need an idea of whether the weight is trending up rapidly or not showing that fluid is accumulating....

Please, caregivers for people with heart failure...do this simple thing!!