About
The CVDPREVENT audit is part of a broader strategic objective outlined in the Long Term Plan to prevent 150,000 strokes, heart attacks and cases of dementia over the next ten years. The audit will prioritise working with system partners to drive CVD quality improvement at individual GP, PCN, and ICS level.
The CVDPREVENT audit is commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) as part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP) and is funded by NHS England (NHSE). It aims to support professionally-led quality improvement in primary care for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in England. Its outputs will support this by helping organisations to identify variation, trends, and opportunities in the identification, diagnosis and management of CVD conditions.
The audit is delivered by the NHS Benchmarking Network, the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities (OHID) - National Cardiovascular Intelligence Network (NCVIN) team, and NHSE. NHS Benchmarking Network receives aggregated data with small numbers suppressed only and therefore do not process personal data as regulated in the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. To ensure patient involvement in the audit, NHSBN work closely with the Patients Association and run and Patient Focus Group.
What is CVDPREVENT?
CVDPREVENT is a national primary care audit that uses data extracted from GP records. It supports primary care in understanding how many people with cardiovascular disease (CVD) or conditions that lead to a higher risk of developing CVD are potentially not identified, undiagnosed, under treated or possibly over-treated. Analysis and reporting of the audit supports systematic quality improvement (QI) to reduce health inequalities and improve outcomes for individuals and populations.
Data is extracted for people that fall within the following cohorts:
Cohort 1 – people with a coded diagnosis of at least one of the following six high-risk conditions:
Atrial fibrillation (AF)
Hypertension
Familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) and other hyperlipidaemias
Chronic kidney disease (CKD)
Non-diabetic hyperglycaemia (NDH)
Type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus
Cohort 2 – people with pre-existing cardiovascular disease comprising at least one of the following:
Peripheral arterial disease (PAD)
Stroke or transient ischaemic attack (TIA)
Coronary heart disease (CHD)
Heart failure (HF)
Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA)
Cohort 3 – case finder cohort consisting of people with clinical records that suggest the possibility of an undiagnosed high-risk condition
For example, this cohort includes people with high blood pressure readings recorded (over the threshold that would classify them as having hypertension), who do not have a formal diagnosis of hypertension recorded on their GP record.
Health inequalities
The audit also collects demographic information for all patients included in the cohorts so that health inequality breakdowns can be reported. The health inequality breakdowns that are currently available are: age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation, learning disability and severe mental illness.
The CVDPREVENT audit aims to align as much as possible with existing policies, programmes and guidance including, the Quality and Outcome Framework (QOF), Primary Care Network (PCN) Directed Enhanced Service (DES), National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance, Core20PLUS5 and the NHS Priorities and Operational Planning Guidance. It should be noted that in some instances exact alignment to other existing indicators is not possible due to the data that is available. Indicators are selected and developed with guidance from the CVDPREVENT Steering Group and CVDPREVENT Primary Care Clinical Panel.
“The CVDPREVENT audit is a valued resource that provides NICE with insight into how our CVD guidance is being used across general practice”
Our partners
The audit is delivered in partnership between:
NHS Benchmarking Network (NHSBN)
National Cardiovascular Intelligence Network (NCVIN) team based in the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), part of the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC)
NHS Digital (now NHS England).
To ensure patient involvement in the audit, NHSBN work closely with the Patients Association.
“We use CVD Prevent to set a consistent baseline for our improvement activity across the ICB footprint.”
“‘We regularly refer to CVDPREVENT data and have included stats from the audit in our policy positions on atrial fibrillation and high blood pressure. ”