England Prioritizes Personalized Cardiovascular Care

A recently published pathway offers updated guidance on optimizing patients’ lipid management after an acute cardiovascular event such as a heart attack or stroke. The document was published by the Academic Health Science Networks, in partnership with the Accelerated Access Collaborative and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. The pathway emphasizes shared decision-making between the patient and their clinician as a means of developing personalized treatment plans.  

Meanwhile, a new initiative from the Government of England seeks to prevent cardiovascular disease across the country by focusing on personalised prevention. The initiative outlines the development of a taskforce with expertise in health policy, health technology, behavioural science and health economics. The taskforce will develop a set of evidence-based recommendations on how to improve patient care and outcomes through a personalised cardiovascular disease prevention approach. 

These new developments show a continued effort to ensure that the principles of patient-centred care are used to guide cardiovascular care in England. These principles include: 

• Treating a patient as an individual rather than defining the patient by his or her disease 
• Cultivating a strong relationship between the patient and clinician, with shared decision-making, rather than sorting a patient in to a more rigid, one-size-fits-all treatment pathway 
• Ensuring that both patients and their health care providers have a voice in treatment decisions  

Cardiovascular disease, along with its risk factors, accounts for up to 250,000 hospital admissions and around 140,000 deaths every year in England. It costs the National Health Service approximately £7.4 billion annually.  

Health systems that focus on shared decision-making and patient-centred care can improve patient outcomes not only in cardiovascular disease, but across disease states and across the world.