We're ‘Going Red’ for Heart Month!

This month we are supporting the British Heart Foundation in their Go Red for Heart Month campaign. 

The British Heart Foundation funds around £100 million of research each year into all heart and circulatory diseases and their causes. Their vision is a world without the fear of heart and circulatory diseases: “a world without heartbreak”. We'd like to help them work towards that goal! Read more about their amazing research here

What are We Doing?

On Tuesday 13th and Wednesday 14th our office will go ‘Red’, where staff will wear red. This maybe be head to toe in red, or it could be a red accessory or even just lipstick! Check out our social media to find out more!

Later this month the team will be able to take part in the BHF's free RevivR session, where staff can learn CPR in just 15 minutes.

Knowing Your Numbers

It is strongly advised that we all ‘know our numbers’. Being informed of our blood pressure is the first step in preventing heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure, to name a few. 

Anyone is able to get their blood pressure tested at your pharmacy, GP surgery or as part of your NHS Health Check (these are advised for those aged 40 - 74 every five years). Your height, weight, and cholesterol are also checked during this appointment to give a rounded view of your overall health, and the ability to give you a cardiovascular risk score. Find more avenues to get your blood pressure checked here

Find out what your numbers mean here

CVDPREVENT Clinical Audit

The CVDPREVENT audit, commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) as part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP) and funded by NHS England & NHS Improvement, aims to support professionally-led quality improvement in primary care for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in England. The audit is delivered by the NHS Benchmarking Network, the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities (OHID) - National Cardiovascular Intelligence Network (NCVIN) team, and NHS Digital.

CVDPREVENT is a primary care audit which automatically extracts data from 98% of the GP practices in England. This data updated quarterly provides insights into the diagnosis, monitoring, treatment and potential overtreatment of patients with and at risk of Cardiovascular diseases.

Statistics - September 2023 - present

• 1.94% of patients who were in the risk range for hypertension did not have a diagnosis, this means that over 950,000 people, in the audit sample, were not diagnosed.

• In those diagnosed 85.09% received a blood pressure test in the last 12 months, however this means that almost 1.2 million patients did not receive a test.

• In patients with diagnosed Cardiovascular diseases, 81.75% received lipid lowering therapy meaning that almost 500,000 patients did not receive lipid lowering therapy.

Find out more about CVDPREVENT and access the data and improvement tool here