NHE England has today published the updated specification for the Hypertension Case-Finding Service on their website.
This follows last month’s change to the Secretary of State Directions which allowed pharmacy technicians to start performing blood pressure checks under the service.
We have updated the service page on our website to reflect the changes and updated resources are also being published for use by our members (pharmacy owners).
Summary of changes
The key changes in the service specification are highlighted in yellow within the document and we have summarised them below:
Inclusion of pharmacy technicians as professionals that can provide the service;
Clarification that people with a high systolic and normal diastolic reading or a high diastolic and normal systolic reading should be recorded as a high blood pressure reading;
Clarifications on the timescales for communication of results to the patient’s general practice (and others, where clinically necessary) to include local agreements related to how this information is communicated;
Adjustments to the advice related to patients identified with ‘very high clinic blood pressure’;
Removal of the requirement for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) to be carried out over 24 hours to bring the service requirements in line with NICE guidance. It can now be undertaken during the person’s usual waking hours;
Adjustments to the advice following identification of stage 2 hypertension after ABPM;
The retention period for data supplied to the NHSBA’s MYS portal has been confirmed as three years;
On withdrawal from provision of the service, members will be asked for their reason for withdrawing;
Members will not be eligible for the setup fee if they withdraw from provision of the service within 30 days of signing up to provide it;
There are now separate service flow charts for each part of the service in annexes B to D;
Annex E includes a summary table of actions to be taken dependent on the blood pressure results; and
The dataset that will be required to be submitted to the NHS Business Services Authority’s Manage Your Service when the application programming interface is in place is included in Annex F.
We encourage members to review the changes to the service, update their standard operating procedures and brief their teams accordingly.
Read and download the service spec
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