Heart Failure and Transplant Center

With heart failure, the heart is unable to pump the right amount of blood throughout the body. This causes blood to back up in the veins and can lead to a build up of excess fluid in the lungs, feet and elsewhere.

While heart failure symptoms can worsen with time, they are often relieved or slowed with treatment. Find out more about heart failure.

Doctors and Nurses Who Know About Heart Failure

At UVA, we have specially trained cardiac doctors and nurses who work with you and your families to treat and monitor your condition and recommend treatment — everything from lifestyle changes like diet and exercise to medications, heart implants, heart transplants and alternatives to heart surgery, like the LVAD implantable device.

We’ll even develop a personalized, effective care plan that takes into account any other conditions you may have, like diabetes or kidney disease.

Special Services

You'll get a complete range of care for your heart failure prognosis. Our specialized services include:

•    A nurse practitioner-led clinic where nurses provide close, individualized care to patients, taking the time to adjust and teach about medications, provide dietary instructions and answer your questions.

•    A Hospital to Home clinic for patients recently discharged from the hospital. This clinic provides close follow-up care for 30 days following discharge in an effort to prevent patients from being readmitted to the hospital.

Convenient Care at UVA and at Home

If traveling to UVA gets inconvenient for you, we can work with providers in your area to schedule routine care like lab work, sleep studies and echocardiograms closer to your home, limiting the number of visits you'll need to make to UVA.

If you have a device implant, we’ll also work with UVA’s device team to see that your appointments with our team and the device team are scheduled on one day.

And if you do need to be admitted to the hospital, we have a special in-patient unit staffed with nurses who’ve had additional education in heart failure treatment.