Heart Failure and Heart Valve Disease | Transforming heart failure care across your Primary Care Network

Introduction
Perhaps the hardest part of heart failure care is standardising and embedding high-quality care processes across the whole Primary Care Network (PCN). This is particularly challenging with workforce shortages, competing priorities and variation in experience.

One of the ways to approach improving heart failure care is to understand current key processes and outcomes across your PCN, co-design a system that works for your practices, and constantly review and improve performance. This approach may be referred to as continuous quality improvement.

This session gives ideas and thoughts about how you may want to tackle heart failure in your PCN. It isn’t designed to give you the answers, given that any new approach must be based on current processes within your PCN and designed by those who work in your PCN in order to get true buy-in.

What do we mean by 'quality'?

The National Quality Board defines 'quality' as care that:

• makes care and treatment as safe as possible
• provides the most effective treatments and care
• empowers patients and delivers a positive patient experience
• provides equitable access and reduces inequalities

Quality care is also:

• well-led by collective and compassionate leaders
• focused on delivering optimum outcomes within available resources
• timely and efficient

At the end of this session you will learn:

• to help Primary Care Networks (PCNs) understand quality improvement methodology
• to support PCNs in identifying their current performance and processes with respect to heart failure
• to signpost to PCNs where to look for data and education
• to offer tips on change management with respect to heart failure