About the programme

Coronary Artery Disease is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, and despite advances in interventional and pharmacological treatments, patients do not always receive optimisation of the pharmacological treatments, resulting in further cardiovascular events and hospital admissions. 

This project will implement quality improvement methodologies and evidence based interventions that will facilitate pathway and clinical service redesign to improve medicine optimisation for people following an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) resulting in improved patient outcomes. 

A secondary prevention clinic has been set up at University Hospital Birmingham which has onboarded patients to be reviewed at three and 12 months following their index event and will be optimised in line with the ESC guidelines.
 
Health Innovation West Midlands (HIWM) will provide clinical expertise as well as support to enable project set up, implementation and evaluation. Success at this trust will enable HIWM to support replication at regional level and the potential to propose this as national programme. 

Programme ambitions

The programme aims to see:

• An increase in prescribed lipid optimisation medications
• Patients being given lifestyle advice
• An increase in patients being referred to cardiac rehabilitation
• Improved blood pressure control for patients
• An increase in patients being prescribed appropriate anti platelet and anticoagulation treatments
• Timely referrals for patients for further input, such as diabetes or weight management services
• Long term benefits of these interventions will aim to see a decrease in hospital admissions and a reduction in recurrent adverse cardiac events

The patients seen within the clinic will benefit from improved management of their cholesterol and blood pressure, which will link in with the aims of HIWM’s lipid optimisation programme and the blood pressure optimisation programme.

Reviewing patients in a timely manner, following their initial cardiac event, will also enable early identification of heart failure which will enable early diagnosis and early optimisation of heart failure medications which will align with HIWMs heart failure project.

Find out more

Get in touch with a member of the project team below to find out how you can get involved.