Day Three of European Week
Wednesday 18th September 2019
Mid way through Heart Valve Disease Awareness Week and neither our energy, nor our schedules, showed any sign of letting up.
This week is about raising awareness for heart disease but it’s incredibly important to us that we champion and celebrate the work already being done at clinics across the country. Today we launched a three day celebration of their work and we’ve been receiving pictures of the teams with a newly designed Heart Valve Voice scrub hats. You can see our good friend Ishtiaq Ahmed with his team who are supporting the Awareness Week as well as other clinics on our facebook and Instagram pages.
For all the hard work being done already we still see far too many patients arrive late in tertiary centres, as well as inequalities in access to innovative treatments. These are the reasons we do what we do with such vigour and why our work is so important. Your access to innovative treatment should not be decided by your postcode and whilst the hard work of us and many others is improving this, there is still plenty left to do.
Today saw the launch of the second edition of our magazine. With articles from British Society of Echocardiography, British Cardiovascular Society and Cardiothoracic Surgery and the British & Irish Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery Society as well as plenty of stories and insights from patients and clinicians it is filled with excellent information about heart valve disease.
The magazine gives us another platform to deliver our message. We want presence every GP surgery in the country (we’re not too ambitious!) . Check in with your clinician to see if they have a copy of it, and if they don’t tell them to get in touch and get one!!
We had to delay our planned tweet chat as I was delayed on my flight to German to launch the new patient charity in Berlin (a few hours delay didn't dampen my spirit and later that night I enjoyed a meal with a number of German clinicians and discussed partnerships and collaboration. More on that tomorrow!