Hypertension, a leading global cause of death, is a significant focus of the NHS Long Term Plan. In North West London, an estimated 207,729 people have undiagnosed hypertension.
The Big NW London Case Find Campaign aimed to improve early detection and management of hypertension, aligned with the NW London Mission for Research and Innovation to Optimise Care for Long-term Conditions, starting with Cardiovascular Disease.
Following the success of the 2023 Big NW London Case Find, ICHP and the NW London Integrated Care Board collaboratively launched the 2024 Big Case Find campaign, running from 13 May to 4 June (aligning with World Hypertension Day and May Measurement Month).
Primary Care Networks (PCNSs) were invited via Clinical Directors and Practice Managers to join the 2024 initiative, with successful PCNs to receive financial support to deliver additional hypertension checks.
12 PCNs across NW London participated in the campaign, with an ask to offer a Blood Pressure check to all clinically appropriate patients they came into contact with (be that in GP surgeries of pharmacies) and deliver additional Blood Pressure clinics at some point in May – either in the surgery or community.
PCNs would then use the WSIC data to compare between their network and peer practices to better understand potential gaps in prevalence within communities and perform searches to identify uncoded patients at risk of hypertension.
This year’s campaign resulted in:
Practice events were the most cost-effective for identifying patients, while community events were the most successful in terms of the number of cases detected.
Patients were giving me really good feedback that we should do more of this. Our team worked really hard and coordinated very well with each other.
The learning from this campaign will be shared with the NW London Hypertension Steering Group and CVD CRG. The system will use the evaluation to help drive more case finding in primary care and communities.
We aim to use this piece of work to help guide future case finding, with the ambition for this to be incorporated as business-as-usual for all NW London PCNs. We also hope to use the evaluation to guide further Health Inequalities work.