Alliance for Heart Failure update November 2024 

Welcome to the Alliance’s latest update as we near the end of 2024. Please read the following information as there are important opportunities to get involved and feed in your expertise to the group’s strategy. 

Pharmacy Campaign

At the end of October the Alliance pitched the pilot of a heart failure case finding service as an addition to the existing hypertension service in pharmacies. Alliance Chair, Preeti Minhas, articulated the advantages of the service to community pharmacies, the NHS as whole, and to patients in “detecting the undetected”. The meeting was a success and the Alliance will now meet with the representative from a major pharmacy multiple in November to discuss how a pilot in a target area might work. 

The Alliance continues to engage pharmacists and other primary care networks on the importance of heart failure using the educational resources we have created. Since July Preeti has met with a group of 30 pharmacists at an event sponsored by Medtronic and addressed delegates at The Pharmacy Show at the NEC on patient pathways, optimisation, and the use of devices and multidisciplinary team working.

We are currently organising an educational webinar targeting healthcare professionals in Primary Care Networks (PCNs), with the aim of hosting the event in February. 

Parliamentary engagement 

At the start of October the Alliance sent out letters to members of the House of Lords explaining our current campaigns and ways members could support. We are in the process of following up with replies. 

The Alliance also had a presence at the Labour Party conference, with the British Society for Echocardiography kindly hosting a flyer with the Alliance’s campaigns and a QR code to the Novartis’s Fighting Failure website with the relevant local heart failure data. We are currently organising outreach to MPs who may have interest in supporting our campaigns at a parliamentary level. 

NT-proBNP campaign 

Following our Freedom of Information requests to ICSs around access to NT-proBNP testing in Community Diagnostic Centres, the same requests have now gone out to all the hospital trusts. Replies are returning, and once all responses have been received we will be assessing and analysing the data to inform engagement with MPs and other stakeholders in the new year over access to tests in diagnostic centres across the country.