Optimising Lipid Management
The HI 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
HI NENC supports regional GP Practices to search their patient records and identify patients with disordered lipids. A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and a Handbook has been developed, along with templates for use by primary care staff. These have been co-created with clinicians in the region and the CDRC team.
A number of templates are available to download:
- Letter for primary prevention switch to high intensity statins (HIST)
- Letter for secondary prevention switch to HIST
- Letter for starting statins
- Letter for cholesterol to target
- Letter for ezetimibe
- Letter to stop fenofibrate
- Honorary contract with GP practice
In addition, there are regional Northern England Evaluation and Lipid Intensification (NEELI) Guidelines which include information across the whole of the lipid pathway including FH. View NEELI guidelines.
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 HI 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.
For more information about lipid optimisation contact Kate Mackay or Nikki Holdsworth.
