Updated Sussex Heart Failure pathway published for primary care

Heart failure affects over a million people across the UK with 200,000 new diagnoses every year. It is a life-limiting condition that too often causes emergency hospital admissions, poor quality of life and ultimately early death. It is possible to live well with heart failure and our heart failure pathways have been standardised for use in Primary Care services to facilitate referrals to diagnostic and heart failure treatment services. Early diagnosis of people with heart failure with prompt access to integrated services and specialist care can help to cut emergency admissions, improve quality of life and give people the opportunity to live well and longer.

However, it is estimated that there are a further 400,000 people with heart failure who are currently undetected, undiagnosed, and consequently missing out on life-preserving treatment and that 80% of heart failure is diagnosed in hospital, yet 40% of people had symptoms that should have triggered an earlier assessment in Primary Care in the months prior to hospital admission.

Updated Heart Failure pathway

The Sussex Health and Care Primary Care Heart Failure Diagnostic and Treatment Pathway is a consolidation of the heart failure pathways, and has now been updated to reflect latest guidance. The document details the diagnostic pathways to be used for suspected unconfirmed heart failure and, when heart failure is already confirmed, the treatment pathway that can be used for heart failure phenotype. Recent advances in the pharmacological treatment of heart failure have expanded the options for patients. We have also created a separate patient information pack, that can be easily printed or sent as a link to patients by text or email.

The pathway was first created in 2020 with Prof Ahmet Fuat, and this updated version (July 2024) was led by Dr Sue Ellery, Alison Warren and Sarah Young through their NHS Sussex HF Steering Group, in collaboration with Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex, British Heart Foundation, Primary Care Cardiovascular Society, Pumping Marvellous, Arrhythmia Alliance and AF Association.

A National Primary Care Heart Failure Diagnostic and Treatment Pathway document has been created to be adopted by any organisation around the country. The unbranded pathway document is available to download and add your organisation’s logo to. If you would like to adopt the pathway and would like support or more information, please contact the Health Innovation KSS CVD team.

Health Innovation KSS and cardiovascular disease prevention

Health Innovation KSS have an exciting new expanded CVD portfolio for 2024/25, working collaboratively with, and offering support to, Kent and Medway, Surrey and Sussex ICBs. Our new CVD Prevention workstreams are:

• Lipids Optimisation
• Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH)
• Blood Pressure Optimisation
• Heart Failure
• CVD Central (Resources and education support)

Join the CVD Central mailing list to receive regular updates on the CVD Central programme, including education opportunities, events and resources. Sign up here and share with your colleagues. You can also check out issue 1 and issue 2 of the newsletter now.

You can also join our new FutureNHS CVD Central Community of Practice where you’ll be able to find recordings and slides from recent webinars on a range of topics in CVD, as well as access our events resources hub, the latest versions of our quarterly newsletter and additional resources that may be useful.