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COURSE IN PREVENTIVE CARDIOLOGY TRAINS STUDENTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Dr Aziz Amir teaches and practices cardiology in Aliabad Teaching Hospital, Kabul Medical University, Afghanistan. In 2008, he enrolled in the new Master of Sciences in Preventive Cardiology at Imperial College, London. He stated “Right now, Afghan health services focus more on treating cardiovascular disease than on preventing it.” He continued “Before I took this course I felt frustrated when I saw Afghan patients with ischaemic heart disease; interventional cardiology is just not an option for most of them and so we are very limited in how much we can help people whose arteries are already blocked. Now I am motivated and have ideas and skills needed to help people not get to this point. I am going to start first with myself and my family, but I also hope to help the medical system put more emphasis on prevention.” He plans to open a “Heart Protection” programme in his hospital in Kabul, to encourage medical faculties to integrate more preventive cardiology into their curricula and to raise public awareness on cardiovascular risk through programmes on a popular radio station that reaches over one million people.

Who teaches the course?
The course is taught by an interdisciplinary team of academic staff from the National Heart and Lung Institute, senior multidisciplinary clinicians from Imperial College Health Care National Health Service (NHS) Trust and visiting experts. It brings together 13 students from seven countries and a variety of health specialties including cardiology, nursing, physiotherapy and psychology. Course Director, Professor David Wood, commented that “with cardiovascular disease the global phenomenon that it is, we were not surprised that students applied from all over the world. We hope they will take back what they learned and apply it in their home settings.”

The course faculty were responsible for the ‘EUROACTION’ trial1 (Lancet, 2008) that demonstrated that the European prevention guidelines were achievable in everyday clinical practice. This experience has led them to recently publish a handbook in preventive cardiology with Oxford University Press. Their latest project is to make the MSc more accessible by developing e-learning options for all aspects of the course.

Applying learning’s from the course
Some of the students will get to apply their learning’s in the UK. Suzy Wood, a cardiac rehabilitation nurse, commented on how her training would enrich the home-based service she runs: “Taking the course has given me ideas for how I can include patients’ partners more…like, for example, inviting them for a risk assessment and if their cardiovascular disease risk is high, offering to help them alongside the patient.” Yashraj Mihdidin found content on smoking cessation to be particularly helpful for his practice as a cardiac nurse in the UK: “I got interested in helping my patients stop smoking and have learned more about motivational skills and interviewing and can suggest more ways to help them through it.”

Along with taking an academic approach to cover the evidence base of preventive cardiology, the course also includes the clinical perspective. Bernadette Woods, a sports psychologist who currently teaches Sport and Exercise Psychology in the UK, found this practical orientation to be one of the most engaging elements of the course. “The time with patients and clinicians that we got in the clinical placements not only helped give a stronger grasp of the academic content, but it convinced me that I want to do more hands-on work when I graduate. I plan to qualify as a 'Clinical Exercise Specialist' so I can work in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and teach on our new Degree in Clinical Exercise Science.”

Further information

Imperial College is accepting applications for the next MSc course, which will begin in October 2009 > 

EURACTION results >

Handbook on preventive cardiology > 

References

1. Wood DA, Kotseva K, Connolly S et al. Nurse-coordinated multidisciplinary family-based cardiovascular disease prevention programme (EUROACTION) for patients with coronary heart disease and asymptomatic individuals at high risk of cardiovascular disease: a paired cluster-randomized trial. Lancet 2008; 371:1999–2012.

 

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