Heart health trial attacks Australia’s biggest killer

A TRIAL currently being conducted via La Trobe Rural Health School’s Violet Vines Marshman Centre for Rural Health Research is helping participants to self-assess their cardiovascular risk using kits co-designed with rural clinicians and health consumers.

Each kit contains portable devices that allow the user to measure their risk indicators such as blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol.

Tests can be completed at home or accessed through community pharmacies and health centres, with results provided by phone or mail.

Associate professor Simon Egerton, deputy head of La Trobe’s Department for Science and Information Technology and the university’s Digital Health for Rural Equity research lead said the project was developed through extensive community co-design, which identified major barriers in the current model of care.

“Too many people in regional and remote communities miss out on routine heart health checks because the existing system doesn’t work for them,” he said.

“We identified major barriers in the current model of care, including limited access to GPs, long travel distances to pathology services, a lack of bulk-billed appointments, out-of-pocket costs and the need for multiple appointments across different days to complete a check.

“By streamlining access using simple technology and trusted community settings, this project has the potential to be truly transformational, particularly in communities without specialist services.”

Cardiovascular disease remains the biggest killer in Australia.

Despite this, uptake of heart health checks nationally is scarily less than one per cent of the population.

Health disparities are also particularly pronounced in regional and remote areas.