Cardiac Rehabilitation Service awarded Full Green Certification

Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust’s Cardiac Rehabilitation (CR) Service has been awarded Full Green Certification by the National Certification Programme for Cardiac Rehabilitation (NCP_CR).

The service is based in Scarborough, covering patient groups from the Scarborough, Ryedale, Pocklington and Whitby areas.

Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation services are a vital part of the care pathway for patients with heart disease. It is an evidence based intervention which reduces future mortality and morbidity, is cost effective and is recommended by many national and international guidelines.

The British Association for Cardiac Prevention and Rehabilitation (BACPR) standards (2017) state that every CR service should submit data to National Audit of Cardiac Rehabilitation (NACR) and strive to meet requirements for certification through the NCP_CR and continue to maintain their certification status each year.

Full Green Certification is achieved by meeting all seven Key Performance Indicators which include data on staffing, the patient groups that CR is offered to, waiting times, duration of CR and completion of initial and final assessments.

The Trust will now be able to demonstrate they provide a recognised and good CR service, and the NCP_CR is a motivation to retain these standards. The service can show that they are certified through use of the NCP_CR logo, and are certified on the national online register. Data from NACR has been utilised to support business cases to get additional staff and/or extend the length of the CR programme duration.

The aim of the CR team has always been to offer a high standard of individualised care for patients; by achieving certification patients can be confident that the service offered meets agreed minimum standards. Duration, shorter wait times, and a multi-disciplinary team approach are all shown by research to increase patient outcomes and adherence to CR programmes.

The clinicians within the team have worked hard to collect the data required, particularly throughout the challenging times of recent months and would like to say a huge thank you to Debbie Anderson (NACR administrator)  for redesigning the data collection tools, managing the database and liaising with NACR. They would also like to thank Nerina Onion from NACR for her ongoing support.