Health Screening - News or History?8 Jan 2008

New 'health MOT' promised by goverment

The Prime Minister's announcement about preventative medicine placed a heavy emphasis on diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Screening for both these conditions should be available at Primary Care Centres. Many GP's and Practice Nurses could be forgiven for asking, "What's all this about then?" The identification of all people with diabetes or at risk of cardiovascular disease was one of the standard criteria in National Service Frameworks published by the government many years ago.

Primary Care professionals are entitled to ask, "What have we been doing these last few years?" Even before GMS QOF, many centres had found many new people with diabetes and coronary heart disease by operating robust targeted screening initiatives. QOF intensified this search.

Surely the aim isn't blanket screening which has been proved many times not to be a cost-effective method of proceeding.

Incidentally, the only "new" money appears to be some which was withheld from Primary Care Centres for just such as purpose. As one commentator aptly put it "robbing Peter to pay Peter!"

No-one is criticising the principle of targeted screening for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Far from it. Prevention and successful treatment of these diseases is essential. Together they make up by far the biggest cause of premature death in this country of ours.

Plainly there will be a demand for more screening from patients. One way that this can be provided is to arrange for Healthcare Assistants to carry our cardiovascular risk assessment. The skills necessary can be learned in our short course Cardiovascular Risk Assessment for Healthcare Assistants.