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“Saving lives by saving hearts”
Helping People Manage Their Heart Disease Risk – Implementing Heart Disease Guidelines
What is the project?
The saving lives by saving hearts project is about finding cardiovascular disease (heart and blood vessels) or diabetes early, when there is still time to do something about it and reduce the incidence of heart disease in our community.
The project uses an internet based software tool, called PREDICT, which guides doctors and nurses to screen their patients for heart disease and to them work with them to their health using patients using New Zealand evidence based guidelines.
General Practitioners and Practice Nurses, in all HealthWEST’s 29 medical centres are able to enter a patient’s clinical details into the template and within 5 seconds, have a risk of heart disease percentage calculated. This indicates the patient’s risk for stroke or heart attack in the next 5 years.
The doctor or nurse can then work with the patient to prescribe the right treatments, including support to change their lifestyle according to the electronic guidelines.
A person with a low risk has a percentage below 10%, a person with medium risk has a percentage between 9 to 15%, and a patient with high risk of stroke or heart attack has a percentage above 16%. Sometimes a person’s risk might be very high and when this happens an urgent consultation with a doctor is arranged.
Why are we undertaking the project?
Because there are too many Waitakere people dying of heart disease and the sad thing is half of our people do not know they have this disease until it is too late. If they did know, with modern drugs and support for changing their life style, they could rapidly and significantly reduce their risk, and live longer and healthier lives.
People especially at risk according to the guidelines are
- All women over 55 years and all men males over 45 years
- Maori, Pacific and people of Indian descent over 45 years for women and over 35 years for men
- People who have a family history of heart disease and diabetes.
The WOW BUS (Wellness Out West)
Previously heart checks had to be undertaken at a medical centre which meant only people already belonging to a centre were able to be assessed.
However we know have the WOW bus and are able to provide free “heart checks” to all who come to the bus. It is a full sized bus, with two work stations, where the nurses can take blood tests (only a finger prick), blood pressure measurements, height and weight and enter these into computers on the bus. All information is kept very confidential, and patients are given an immediate report with recommendations and information can be sent back to a person’s GP where they already have one
This is an outreach project, which very much relies on community collaboration and support. With the bus we can offer the heart risk assessment and arrange care with a medical centre to those who may not yet have one.
The bus service and its timetable is advertised in Western Leader, and on community notice boards. We are grateful to our sponsors for making this service available. Principle sponsor … The Waitakere Licensing Trusts.
Contact details 0800 4 WOW BUS (0800 4 969287)
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