But in County Durham, Mike Lavender, a consultant in public health medicine, and his team have developed a proactive health check programme.
Long-term declines in traditional risk factors contributed to reductions in estimated CVD-risk prior to the introduction of a health check programme.
6 11 In 2008, NHS Health Check (formerly called the Vascular Check Programme) was introduced to identify and manage vascular risk.
This measurement is not routinely undertaken in the primary care assessment of patients with hypertension and is not included in the NHS health check programme.
Data quality was ensured through careful selection and training of the research assistants, supervision, field editing, and by use of the check programme at data entry.
20 The CKD-EPI formula produces a good estimate of GFR in Japanese patients, and the distribution of patients with different stages of CKD was calculated using data from a Japanese annual health check programme.
General health checks have long been common elements of healthcare in some countries such as the United States. 1 2 In the UK, the publicly funded NHS Health Check programme was introduced in 2009, and in Denmark an organised health check programme for the general public has been suggested, but now seems abandoned.
There is good evidence that opportunistic screening for AF using manual palpation in primary care is cost effective [ 16, 19] and screening for hypertension forms part of the NHS health check programme [ 20], although there is no formal screening programme in the UK for the diagnosis of AF in the population.
We thank staff in the Centre for Epidemiology and Research: Kim Lim for management of the linked datasets and checking programmes used in the analysis, and George Doukas for administering the datasets held on the Health Outcomes and Information Statistical Toolkit HOISTT) data warehouse.
The promotion of opportunistic screening for diabetes, 1 coupled with the assessment of diabetes risk in national health checks programmes, 2 will lead to a greater number of individuals being diagnosed early in the disease trajectory.
