Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress has been made against each of the actions in their Cardiovascular Disease Outcomes Strategy.

It is for NHS England, working with Public Health England (PHE) and other stakeholders, to implement the actions set out in the Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) Outcomes Strategy. NHS England has established a working group with PHE which meets quarterly to discuss progress on the strategy and is taking action on all the recommendations, some it has prioritised over others.

For example, on making benchmarked data on CVD risk factors available, PHE has established a CVD National Cardiovascular Intelligence Network and a Partnership Board. These bring together a variety of stakeholders which hold or have an interest in this type of data, including the leads of the existing clinical audits covering cardiovascular disease.

PHE also continues to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of CVD by running campaigns such as Act FAST. This has been the Department’s and PHE’s most successful campaign and continues to help people experiencing the signs and symptoms of a stroke get to hospital quicker. The campaign will be run again during 2014-15.

NHS England’s National Clinical Director for Cardiac Disease established a Familial Hypercholesterolaemia (FH) advisory group which has identified some of the barriers to identifying more families with FH and will continue to develop and spread good practice in this field.

At a local level, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are being encouraged to implement the Strategy with the support of the twelve Strategic Clinical Networks. These networks are working with CCGs and other partners in the health and care system to identify local and regional priorities for cardiac and renal disease, diabetes and stroke.

All 152 local authorities are offering the NHS Health Check programme, which aims to present heart disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease. Local authorities have a legal duty to deliver the programme to all of their eligible population once every five years. In 2013-14 a total of 2.8 million people (18.5%) of the five years eligible population were offered an NHS Health Check while just fewer than 1.4 million received an NHS Health Check, equating to 49% of those offered. This is the greatest number of NHS Health Checks offerred and received in one year since the programme began.