2020 Pledge

Happy new year!! I hope you all had a great festive period and a lovely new year. The festive period gave us an opportunity to reflect on the work we did last year, and our End of Year report really crystallises all that we were able to achieve. However, now a new year and decade is upon us and it is time to look forward to 2020 and action the plans that we have put in place for The Year of the Patient. Here is our pledge for 2020..

We pledge to continue to fight for best practice and care for patients.

Our Gold Standard of Care is going to shape much of the work we do this year. It will help us to identify and showcase best practice in diagnosis, treatment and post treatment care. Ensuring optimisation of patient pathways in order to reduce the strain on services and guarantee best patient outcomes.

Our Gold Standard will strengthen our relationship with professional societies, emboldening the Gold Standard’s power and allowing us to collaborate with them to ensure patients and their stories continue to affect change in care guidelines.

We pledge to continue to work with patients, clinicians and policy makers to improve guidelines and pathways.

2020 will be the year where we implement recommendations from our Task Force from 2019. From the beginning of 2020 we will be looking at innovative ways to implement our Gold Standard, and make sure that we are working together to deliver guidelines which are built on a foundation of patient experience.

We pledge to improve detection and diagnosis of valve disease.

Community detection and raising awareness of prevalence will form a central part in our campaign work this year. I wrote before about access to echo and the different projects we want to be a part of in improving access. 2020 will mark the first year of our flu jab project, as well as digital stethoscope projects, diversifying where patients can access echo, as well as awareness campaigns which will promote the importance of increasing echo checks and improving access to them.

Read more here.