Alliance for Heart Failure – improving access to life-saving diagnosis and treatment on the NHS

Challenge

Heart failure is a complex clinical condition involving a multidisciplinary team of different clinicians and health professionals. Working across the NHS to deliver meaningful change in this area involves engaging with a number of different stakeholders and audiences, from MPs to regional heart failure specialists.

Strategy

Via a comprehensive stakeholder mapping exercise we have gained a thorough understanding of the different challenges and priorities of everyone from NHS policymakers to specialist heart failure nurses. This allows us to use our resources and expertise to deliver a variety of campaigns – from educating community pharmacists around heart failure to helping NICE improve the quality of heart failure care on the NHS.

Outcome

Following the launch of Alliance’s Call to Action report in 2021 and a parliamentary roundtable, we’ve helped to make heart failure a major concern for policymakers. With the disease a priority in the NHS Long Term Plan, the Alliance regularly meets with a range of key decision makers across the NHS and government to support a number of initiatives to tackle the burden. Alongside this, we also implement campaigns that reach thousands of NHS staff to improve the timely and equitable access to life-saving treatment diagnosis and treatment.