Heart Failure Summit | Pumping Marvellous

HEART FAILURE SUMMIT 2017

OUR HEART FAILURE CONVERSATION

Heart Failure Summit 2017 marked the beginning of a new chapter where the patients’ voice was heard. The next 10 years are going to be heart failure’s time, when heart failure crawls away from being a second-class citizen and puts itself firmly on the health agenda. You would hope this would be the case, considering there is a tsunami of heart failure coming our way. The patients need solutions. We have enough challenges. In fact we are overloaded with things to fix. It’s important our language is positive and solution driven.

PROBLEMATIC DIAGNOSIS

Being diagnosed with a condition like heart failure not only presents problems clinically for the individual. It also has a significant impact on their mental well-being and the socio-economic factors of having to manage a condition that sets you up for failure.

Heart Failure Movement

A movement is afoot, patients and carers are starting to energise conversations. It is not the sole responsibility of the healthcare professionals to drive change. It is not the sole responsibility of academics to drive robust trials. What I am saying is that we must band together, understand our different points of view and drive solutions through to policymakers to ensure that people managing their heart failure get the best deal they can from the health system. This means the best treatments, the best care and the best non-medical support for patients and their families. It means investing time and money, innovation and change, so that we know patients and their families have the best quality of life they can, living and managing their heart failure better.

Being collegiate about our problems

To do this, we need to work together to create a powerful movement of stakeholders who represent the patients and families, who capture the challenges and deliver solutions. Bringing together the stakeholders at the heart failure summit helped prioritise the key focusses for the next 18 months up to the end of 2018.

Why have a Heart Failure Summit

My name is Nick Hartshorne-Evans, I’ve been on a personal journey with my health since my diagnosis of heart failure in 2010. A lot of what I have learnt has been through personal experience but more importantly, through interactions with the many thousands of patients, carers and families who connect with the Pumping Marvellous Foundation on a day to day, month to month basis. The Pumping Marvellous Foundation has had to grind out a position where it can energise and invigorate the patients’ and their families’ opinions, whilst feeding these insights into the whole heart failure conversation, where these can be used collaboratively with other stakeholders to create the correct conversation that instigates change.

DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCE FROM THE HEART FAILURE SUMMIT

Please utilise some of the resources we have produced as a product of a very productive evening with Patients, Carers, Professors, Cardiologists, Academics, Heart Failure Nurses, Academics, Leading Charities, Pharmacists and many more…

If you are a heart failure patient, carer or family member please come and join our Community on Facebook, it really makes a difference to those managing their heart failure better.