Heart Diseases

(asked on 8th March 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department and the NHS are taking to support uptake and implementation of the NICE Quality Standard on acute heart failure.


Answered by
 Portrait
David Mowat
This question was answered on 15th March 2017

Most heart failure services are commissioned by clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and NHS England expects CCGs to be following National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance.

To help the National Health Service understand what a good quality service looks like, NICE publish quality standards which define best practice within a topic area and it has published quality standards for acute and chronic heart failure. These can be found at:

https://www.nice.org.uk/Guidance/QS9

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs103

NHS England does commission specialised services and this includes some implantable pacemakers/defibrillators for heart failure patients, and for which a service specification exists. A best practice tariff exists for providers which admit acute heart failure patients and is related to adherence to NICE quality standards.

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