Establishment of information systems: Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Audit Directions 2020

The CVDPREVENT Audit is a national primary care audit that supports the implementation of the NHS Long Term Plan, the annually negotiated General Medical Services contract and the national CVD Prevention programme. The CVDPREVENT Audit is commissioned and delivered by several partners (hereafter referred to as the Audit Partners¹) including NHS England, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) and HQIP’s commissioned provider NHS Benchmarking Network.  

The NHS Long Term Plan identifies CVD as a clinical priority and the single biggest condition where lives can be saved by the NHS over the next 10 years. CVD causes a quarter of all deaths in the UK and is the largest cause of premature mortality in deprived areas.

The aim of the CVDPREVENT Audit is to support professionally led quality improvement, optimising diagnosis and treatment of high-risk conditions to prevent heart attacks and strokes at scale. The CVDPREVENT Audit also aims to evaluate the national CVD Prevention programme and inform better decisions on its delivery.

To deliver the CVDPREVENT Audit, routinely recorded general practice data is extracted by NHS England via the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES). The data has and continues to help clinicians understand how well they are performing in the diagnosis and management of six high-risk conditions for CVD.

CVDPREVENT Audit data is also re-used for the purposes of the National Obesity Audit (NOA). The aim of the NOA is to drive improvement in quality of care available to those living with overweight and obesity in England. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has given the National Obesity Audit Directions 2023 to NHS England to establish the NOA.

254(1) and (6), section 260(2)(d), section 260(4)(a), section 261(2)(e), section 262(5) and section 304(9), (10) and (12) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (the 2012 Act).