Cardiac rehabilitation
Context:
Cardiac rehabilitation helps recovery after a cardiac event and enables patients to achieve and maintain better health. Cardiac rehabilitation is an effective intervention for patients, and is shown to be effective in reducing cardiac deaths, cardiovascular disease and risk factors.
A typical cardiac rehabilitation programme entails exercise and information sessions to help patients understand their condition better, recover from surgery and / or a heart attack and make lifestyle changes that will improve their heath.
Patients who have had certain cardiac (heart) conditions or procedures including heart attacks, a heart angioplasty, by-pass surgery, complex pacemakers, and heart failure patients should have access to cardiac rehabilitation services.
Aims:
The overall aim of the task group is to increase access to, equity of provision for, and uptake of cardiac rehabilitation services for patients having heart attack and/ or revascularisation, in line with the National Service Framework for CHD. In order to achieve this, the task group aims to utilise the recent NICE commissioning guide for cardiac rehabilitation services and proposed cardiac rehabilitation tariff which has recently been announced by the Department of Health.
Updates:
Data is currently being collected on the number of referrals received for surgical and medical patients which is shared at quarterly task group meetings. The task group aims to gradually increase the data measures to include further measures such as number of patients offered cardiac rehabilitation and number of patients attended cardiac rehabilitation. It has also been agreed to benchmark outcomes taken from the annual NACR outcome reports against national outcomes for each individual CR programme. This has been suggested as a further performance monitoring initiative using existing resources. The task group has also recently reviewed the membership of the task group and invited new members to the group who would be able to provide relevant contribution.