Inequity in cardiovascular care in the English National Health Service (NHS): a scoping review of the literature

There is a general understanding that socioeconomically disadvantaged people are also disadvantaged with respect to their access to NHS care. Insofar as considerable NHS funding has been targeted at deprived areas, it is important to better understand whether and why socioeconomic variations in access and utilisation exist. Exploring this question with reference to cardiovascular care, our aims were to synthesise and evaluate evidence relating to access to and/or use of English NHS services around (i) different points on the care pathway (i.e. presentation, primary management and specialist management) and (ii) different dimensions of inequality (socioeconomic, age- and gender-related, ethnic or geographical). Restricting our search period from 2004 to 2016, we were concerned to examine whether, compared to earlier research, there has been a change in the focus of research examining inequalities in cardiac care and whether the pro-rich bias reported in the late 1990s and early 2000s still applies today. We conducted a scoping study drawing on Arksey &amp; O'Malley's framework. A total of 174 studies were included in the review and appraised for methodological quality. Although, in the past decade, there has been a shift in research focus away from gender and age inequalities in access/use and towards socioeconomic status and ethnicity, evidence that deprived people are less likely to access and use cardiovascular care is very contradictory. Patterns of use appear to vary by ethnicity; South Asian populations enjoying higher access, black populations lower. By contrast, female gender and older age are consistently associated with inequity in cardiovascular care. The degree of geographical variation in access/use is also striking. Finally, evidence of inequality increases with stage on the care pathway, which may indicate that barriers to access arise from the way in which health professionals are adjudicating health needs rather than a failure to seek help in the first place.</p

Worldwide trends in hypertension prevalence and progress in treatment and control from 1990 to 2019: a pooled analysis of 1201 population-representative studies with 104 million participants

Background: Hypertension can be detected at the primary health-care level and low-cost treatments can effectively control hypertension. We aimed to measure the prevalence of hypertension and progress in its detection, treatment, and control from 1990 to 2019 for 200 countries and territories.Methods: We used data from 1990 to 2019 on people aged 30-79 years from population-representative studies with measurement of blood pressure and data on blood pressure treatment. We defined hypertension as having systolic blood pressure 140 mm Hg or greater, diastolic blood pressure 90 mm Hg or greater, or taking medication for hypertension. We applied a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate the prevalence of hypertension and the proportion of people with hypertension who had a previous diagnosis (detection), who were taking medication for hypertension (treatment), and whose hypertension was controlled to below 140/90 mm Hg (control). The model allowed for trends over time to be non-linear and to vary by age.Findings: The number of people aged 30-79 years with hypertension doubled from 1990 to 2019, from 331 (95% credible interval 306-359) million women and 317 (292-344) million men in 1990 to 626 (584-668) million women and 652 (604-698) million men in 2019, despite stable global age-standardised prevalence. In 2019, age-standardised hypertension prevalence was lowest in Canada and Peru for both men and women; in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and some countries in western Europe including Switzerland, Spain, and the UK for women; and in several low-income and middle-income countries such as Eritrea, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Solomon Islands for men. Hypertension prevalence surpassed 50% for women in two countries and men in nine countries, in central and eastern Europe, central Asia, Oceania, and Latin America. Globally, 59% (55-62) of women and 49% (46-52) of men with hypertension reported a previous diagnosis of hypertension in 2019, and 47% (43-51) of women and 38% (35-41) of men were treated. Control rates among people with hypertension in 2019 were 23% (20-27) for women and 18% (16-21) for men. In 2019, treatment and control rates were highest in South Korea, Canada, and Iceland (treatment >70%; control >50%), followed by the USA, Costa Rica, Germany, Portugal, and Taiwan. Treatment rates were less than 25% for women and less than 20% for men in Nepal, Indonesia, and some countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Control rates were below 10% for women and men in these countries and for men in some countries in north Africa, central and south Asia, and eastern Europe. Treatment and control rates have improved in most countries since 1990, but we found little change in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Improvements were largest in high-income countries, central Europe, and some upper-middle-income and recently high-income countries including Costa Rica, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, and Iran.Interpretation: Improvements in the detection, treatment, and control of hypertension have varied substantially across countries, with some middle-income countries now outperforming most high-income nations. The dual approach of reducing hypertension prevalence through primary prevention and enhancing its treatment and control is achievable not only in high-income countries but also in low-income and middle-income settings.Copyright (C) 2021 World Health Organization; licensee Elsevier.</p

VivaScope® 1500 and 3000 systems for detecting and monitoring skin lesions: a systematic review and economic evaluation

Background: Skin cancer is one of the most common cancers in the UK. The main risk factor is exposure to ultraviolet radiation from sunlight or the use of sunbeds. Patients with suspicious skin lesions are first examined with a dermoscope. After examination, those with non-cancerous lesions are discharged, but lesions that are still considered clinically suspicious are surgically removed. VivaScope® is a non-invasive technology designed to be used in conjunction with dermoscopy to provide a more accurate diagnosis, leading to fewer biopsies of benign lesions or to provide more accurate presurgical margins reducing the risk of cancer recurrence. Objectives: To evaluate the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of VivaScope® 1500 (Caliber Imaging and Diagnostics, Rochester, NY, USA; Lucid Inc., Rochester, NY, USA; or Lucid Inc., MAVIG GmbH, Munich, Germany) and VivaScope® 3000 (Caliber Imaging and Diagnostics, Rochester, NY, USA) in the diagnosis of equivocal skin lesions, and VivaScope 3000 in lesion margin delineation prior to surgical excision of lesions. Data sources: Databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE and The Cochrane Library) were searched on 14 October 2014, reference lists of included papers were assessed and clinical experts were contacted for additional information on published and unpublished studies. Methods: A systematic review was carried out to identify randomised controlled trials (RCTs) or observational studies evaluating dermoscopy plus VivaScope, or VivaScope alone, with histopathology as the reference test. A probabilistic de novo economic model was developed to synthesise the available data on costs and clinical outcomes from the UK NHS perspective. All costs were expressed as 2014 prices. Results: Sixteen studies were included in the review, but they were too heterogeneous to be combined in a meta-analysis. One of two diagnostic studies that were deemed most representative of UK clinical practice reported that dermoscopy plus VivaScope 1500 was significantly more sensitive than dermoscopy alone in the diagnosis of melanoma (97.8% vs. 94.6%; p = 0.043) and significantly more specific than dermoscopy alone in the diagnosis of non-melanoma (92.4% vs. 26.74%; p  5 mm beyond the dermoscopically identified margin. Using ‘optimistic’ diagnostic data, the economic model resulted in an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of £8877 per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) (£9362 per QALY), while the ‘less favourable’ diagnostic data resulted in an ICER of £19,095 per QALY (£25,453 per QALY) in the diagnosis of suspected melanomas. VivaScope was also shown to be a dominant strategy when used for the diagnostic assessment of suspected basal cell carcinoma (BCC). Regarding margin delineation of LM, mapping with VivaScope was cost-effective, with an ICER of £10,241 per QALY (£11,651 per QALY). However, when VivaScope was used for diagnosis as well as mapping of LM, then the intervention cost was reduced and VivaScope became a dominant strategy. Limitations: There is an absence of UK data in the included studies and, therefore, generalisability of the results to the UK population is unclear. Conclusions: The use of VivaScope appears to be a cost-effective strategy in the diagnostic assessment of equivocal melanomas and BCCs, and in margin delineation of LM prior to surgical treatment. Future work: High-quality RCTs are required in a UK population to assess the diagnostic accuracy of VivaScope in people with equivocal lesions. Study registration: This study is registered as PROSPERO CRD42014014433. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Health Technology Assessment programme

The effectiveness of service delivery initiatives at improving patients' waiting times in clinical radiology departments: a systematic review.

We reviewed the literature for the impact of service delivery initiatives (SDIs) on patients' waiting times within radiology departments. We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, INSPEC and The Cochrane Library for relevant articles published between 1995 and February, 2013. The Cochrane EPOC risk of bias tool was used to assess the risk of bias on studies that met specified design criteria. Fifty-seven studies met the inclusion criteria. The types of SDI implemented included extended scope practice (ESP, three studies), quality management (12 studies), productivity-enhancing technologies (PETs, 29 studies), multiple interventions (11 studies), outsourcing and pay-for-performance (one study each). The uncontrolled pre- and post-intervention and the post-intervention designs were used in 54 (95%) of the studies. The reporting quality was poor: many of the studies did not test and/or report the statistical significance of their results. The studies were highly heterogeneous, therefore meta-analysis was inappropriate. The following type of SDIs showed promising results: extended scope practice; quality management methodologies including Six Sigma, Lean methodology, and continuous quality improvement; productivity-enhancing technologies including speech recognition reporting, teleradiology and computerised physician order entry systems. We have suggested improved study design and the mapping of the definitions of patient waiting times in radiology to generic timelines as a starting point for moving towards a situation where it becomes less restrictive to compare and/or pool the results of future studies in a meta-analysis