News, Primary Care News

Cheshire and Merseyside digital first team to develop BP@home blueprint

Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership is developing a digital blueprint to share learnings from its BP@Home programme.

Led by the partnership’s Digital First Primary Care team, the programme is distributing blood pressure monitors to people who have been diagnosed with uncontrolled high blood pressure and who could benefit from regular checks.

The team has so far issued 20,000 monitors to people locally, and now plans to share its learnings through step-by-step guides on its local roll-out.

Said to be one of the first NHSX blueprints to focus on primary care, it is hoped it will support areas across the country in developing their remote monitoring services.

Sally Deacon, Programme Lead for the Hypertension Accelerator Project, part of the Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership, said: “High blood pressure is a common condition that can cause cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes, and many cases of dementia, if it’s not detected and monitored appropriately. Improving how we monitor blood pressure, presents one of the biggest opportunities to save lives, minimise the burden of disease for patients, and reduce inequalities, and that’s why my team and I are so passionate about capturing and sharing our learning from our work here in Cheshire and Merseyside.

“We recognise that as well as it being utilised to improve outcomes for patients that may suffer from hypertension, there is also significant opportunity for the blueprint to be used by other healthcare systems and providers across the country, to improve the detection and management of long-term conditions in general”.

Alex Chaplin, Chief Digital Information Officer at the Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership, added: “We’re so passionate about supporting NHSX’s Blueprinting programme, by developing and sharing knowledge assets like this Hypertension Blueprint.

“It’s only through working together and sharing our learning in a joined-up way, that we can truly begin to utilise digital technology to support us in tackling some of the core challenges that we face collectively. For example, the increasing number of patients we’re seeing nationally with long-term health conditions, and comorbidities. A demand, which can be tackled, in part, using processes like remote monitoring, that can help to enable the delivery of safer, more effective, and efficient care to patients. Whilst also empowering healthcare professionals to recognise early signs of deterioration, which in turn can improve outcomes for patients, and ultimately save lives.”

Over the past years HTN has been supporting the blueprinting programme, including by hosting an online session focusing on adopting digital blueprints and a session exploring what a good blueprint looks like. Our next webinar with the NHSX Blueprinting team is set to take place 17 January 2022, at 3:00pm.

The Hypertension Blueprint from Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership will be available on the FutureNHS website early next year.