More practices in Greater Manchester set to improve care for heart failure patients

Following on from the success of the Greater Manchester Heart Failure Investigation Tool (GM HFIT) project in NHS Manchester, the GM CLAHRC team are now busy expanding the project to other parts of the region.

Seven more practices in Bury, Ashton, Leigh and Wigan have signed up to take part in the project which aims to increase awareness of heart failure and improve the GP’s knowledge and skills of the condition to enable them to manage patients more effectively.

To support the additional work including audits of heart failure registers, the team have recently appointed community heart failure specialist nurse, Carolyne Feldman on an ad hoc basis. Carolyne will work with nurse practitioner Sam Lacey and heart failure specialist nurses Kieley Wild and Dan Terry to support the work on validating the heart failure registers, auditing the current patient management and case finding, i.e. helping to identify patients with heart failure who are not currently on the register.

Lorraine Burey Improvement Manager at the GM CLAHRC, has led the work on heart failure for GM CLAHRC, she said: “It is fantastic to see so many GP practices keen to take part in the project. The results from the Manchester project have been very encouraging and GPs’ responses to improving their understanding of heart failure have been positive. This is great because it means we are increasing awareness of the condition and enabling GPs to provide better care for heart failure patients.”

To initiate the learning around identification and management of heart failure, specialist nurses Kieley Wild and Dan Terry recently presented at the Bury practice nurse forum to inform practices about the work they will be doing to help them improve care for heart failure patients. They plan to follow this up with more focused education sessions at the practices.

Date Published: 12/10/2012