Cardiac Rehabilitation Lead Mari Fantocchi shares how our cardiac rehabilitation services have retained the National Certification Programme:

What is our Cardiac Rehabilitation Service?

The Cardiac Rehabilitation Service at our Trust consists of a team of nurses, physiotherapist, exercise assistant, psychologist, and admin support with additional occasional input from pharmacists and dieticians. 

We see patients following a recent cardiac event including heart attack, stents, bypass surgery, valve surgery, insertion of an ICD and transplant surgery. We have an individual appointment with the patient and their family - if they wish - for advice and support tailored to them on their recovery, medication, diet, lifestyle modification, and risk factor minimisation. This is currently being conducted via telephone or virtually. 

The patients are then followed up in a variety of ways, including a home-based programme that involves regular telephone or virtual contact. We also have group exercises available which can be face to face at King George Hospital or virtual. 

Maintaining our full green standard

We have succeeded in maintaining our full green certification under the National Certification Programme for Cardiac Rehabilitation (NCP_CR) despite the challenges which Covid-19 has presented and the on-going challenges we are facing due to loss of space to run our classes.

The NCP_CR is assessed by our input into the National Audit for Cardiac Rehabilitation (NACR). There are seven minimum standards for Cardiac Rehabilitation services and to achieve full green certification all seven standards must be achieved. These standards include having a multi-disciplinary team involved; seeing all priority groups; the duration of the programme; the percentage of patients completing their first and second assessments; and the length of time from referral to starting their programme. 

Nationally, there are 213 eligible cardiac rehabilitation programmes entering data onto NACR - of these, only 64 are certified as green.

This is 30%, and so we are very proud to be among this number.