CVDACTION: Delivering the prevention shift at the heart of the NHS 10 Year Plan

The NHS 10 Year Plan outlines an ambitious vision for healthcare in England, which aims to move care into neighbourhoods, prevent illness before it occurs, and make digital tools work for clinicians and patients alike. At Into-Action.Health, we welcome this direction and it aligns directly with the mission behind CVDACTION.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of premature death and health inequality in the UK. It drives emergency admissions and costs to health and social care, but it is largely preventable. NICE-recommended treatments for high risk conditions like blood pressure, cholesterol, chronic kidney disease and diabetes are highly effective at preventing CVD but are substantially underused. The challenge is how to improve this in general practice.

Dr Matt Kearney, Co-Founder of Into-Action.Health, said:

“General practice is under pressure. Managing high-risk conditions like hypertension, cholesterol or diabetes is hard when patients’ conditions are complex and time is short. CVDACTION addresses that challenge - not only by surfacing data and highlighting the risks, but also by supporting teams in primary care to act on it.”

Designed for the realities of primary care

The NHS 10-Year Plan picks out secondary prevention of CVD as a priority with the announcement of ‘Prevention Accelerators’ to improve uptake of CVD prevention treatments.

CVDACTION can support this by prioritising high-risk patients for review, with in-built filters to address health inequalities. But the tool alone is not enough. The CVDACTION Demonstrator Programme, delivered in partnership with NHS England, combined smart data with support to:

• Mobilise pharmacists, admin teams and wider clinical roles to deliver proactive care

• Adapt clinical pathways and empower patients

• Involve local leadership and provide structured implementation support

Impact for patients, the NHS and the economy

In just six months, across 10 primary care networks (serving 600,000 people), the programme showed early evidence of a step change in treatment optimisation. Large numbers of patients with hypertension had their blood pressure optimised. People with existing CVD started lipid-lowering therapy.

These improvements have real-world implications. According to UCLPartners’ Size of the Prize:

• Increasing blood pressure optimisation from 67% to 80% would prevent 6,000 heart attacks and strokes every year in England

• A new report from Health Innovation Network and Frontier Economics shows that optimising blood pressure treatment could add £1.2bn to the economy in five years

• Optimising cholesterol treatment adds another £1.1bn

“The Government’s mission to reduce deaths from heart attack and stroke by a quarter in ten years is the right ambition,” said Dr Kearney. “But it won’t be achieved without a radical shift in how we deliver care for the high-risk conditions that cause CVD. CVDACTION shows how we can do it. Now we must implement it at scale.”