UK Committee Established

February 20th 2020

Valve for Life has established a committee to manage and run the initiative in the UK. The team will work together to achieve the initiative’s primary goal of increasing access to transcatheter heart therapies in the UK.

Dan Blackman, Consultant Interventional Cardiologist of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust will lead the project alongside a team five Interventional Cardiologists from across the UK. They are; Clare Appleby of Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, Jonathan Byrne of King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, John Rawlins of University Hospital Southampton, Sam Dawkins John Radcliffe Hospital and Phil MacCarthy of King's College Hospital.

The team has met virtually to share how transcatheter heart therapies are accessed in their region or centre, addressing the issues and barriers they face as well as initial ideas for increasing TAVI access within their centre. This has helped to highlight regional discrepancies and barriers to expansion as well as uncovering common problems across multiple centres could be a problem nationwide.

To build on this important knowledge, Valve for Life UK is issuing a survey to be completed by every TAVI centre in England. The survey will assess current capacity within the centre as well as barriers to increasing capacity, helping to gain deeper insight into the difficulty’s patients face in finding treatment for Aortic Stenosis in the UK. Survey findings will become the framework for the Valve for Life initiative by highlighting the issues faced by individual centres and highlighting the main issues faced across the UK and using this discovery as the basis to finding and implementing solutions as part of the Valve for Life mission.

You can view the team and find out more about the Valve for Life UK mission by clicking the button below.