Optimising Lipid Management

The AHSN NENC Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Programme has a particular focus on optimising the treatment of disordered lipids to give patients the best chance of avoiding cardiac events.

Disordered Lipids

Disordered lipids impact peoples’ health over time causing heart attack and strokes. Often, people do not know they have disordered lipids until they have a cholesterol check or have a heart attack or stroke. Treatment is effective, significantly reducing the chances of having a cardiac event. Patients with disordered lipids need to be identified, plus those with known disordered lipids need to have their treatment optimised, giving them the best chance of avoiding cardiac problems.

A number of new therapies to treat patients with high cholesterol are now available if statins are not tolerated; these include Ezetimibe, Bempedoic Acid, Inclisiran and PCSK9i. The latter drug is an injectable, administered in secondary care, whilst the others can all be prescribed in primary care.

Delivery across the North East and Cumbria

The AHSN NENC will support regional GP Practices to search their patient records and identify patients with disordered lipids. We have developed a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and a Handbook along with templates for use by primary care staff. These have been developed collaboratively with clinicians and the CDRC team.

View SOP

View Handbook

A selection of templates are available:

There are regional Northern England Evaluation and Lipid Intensification (NEELI) Guidelines which include information across the whole of the lipid pathway including FH, and we would encourage these to be followed.

CDRC Precision

Using the searches provided by CDRC Precision it is possible to identify potential high-risk patients with disordered lipids registered at GP practices.

CDRC Precision digital resources are designed and developed in the North East and North Cumbria by local clinicians. Their work is supported by NHS England, North of England Commissioning Support (NECS) and the Academic Health Science Network for the North East and North Cumbria (AHSN NENC).

All CDRC resources are available at no cost to Primary Care users and can be accessed via SystmOne or EMIS. For information on how to access the resources from your preferred clinical system, please visit the CDRC webpage for EMIS here or the SystmOne resources page here.

UCLPartners Long term condition pathway

More details are available by following the link below:

https://uclpartners.com/theme/cardiovascular/

For more information about lipid optimisation contact Kate Mackay or Nikki Holdsworth.