Lipid Management and FH

The NHS Long Term Plan (LTP) highlights cardiovascular prevention and detection of familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) as key priorities for the NHS to improve the nation’s health. It identifies cardiovascular disease (CVD) as the single biggest area where lives can be saved by the NHS over the next 10 years and includes an ambition to prevent 150,000 strokes, heart attacks and cases of dementia over the same period. 

The national CVD Prevention Programme is developing targeted interventions to reduce the risk of CVD at both the individual and populational level by focusing on three key CVD risk factors. 

CVD PREVENT is a national primary care audit that will automatically extract routinely held GP data covering diagnosis and management of six high risk conditions helping primary care to understand how many patients with the high-risk conditions are potentially undiagnosed, under treated or over treated.

Over the next three years the 15 AHSN’s will focus on enabling the NHS to optimise lipid management in people at increased cardiovascular risk in support of these long term ambitions through its CVD Programme (led by the team at North East and North Cumbria AHSN). The objectives of the programme are;

To increase the numbers of those who have their cholesterol measured and to identify those with conditions that increase familial risk of hypercholesterolaemia

• To reduce the risk for heart attacks and strokes occurring
• To reduce the risk of admissions and re-admissions associated with cardiovascular disease
• To reduce health inequalities by ensuring a consistent, national approach to lipid management, using a NICE approved clinical pathway
• To provide more treatment options to high-risk patients who remain at risk despite maximum tolerated statin therapy.

Across Wessex delivery of the programme will incorporate AF activity already underway and bring together work to support the NHS Accelerated Access Review Rapid Uptake Product (AAC RUP) of PCSK9 inhibitors, high intensity statins and ezetimibe. The Rapid Uptake Product element of the programme is a novel, NICE-approved clinical pathway, focusing on secondary prevention.