The Vascular Society was awarded a grant of £380,000 from the Health Foundation to help us achieve our ambition of reducing the mortality associated with aortic aneurysm surgery to 3.5% by 2013. We aim to make real improvement in these outcomes by encouraging improvements in care.
The Health Foundation funds projects through a scheme called “Closing the Gap”. Closing the Gap aims to improve the quality of care delivered to patients by bridging the gap between known best practice and the routine delivery of care. The Vascunet report of 2007 identified a clear gap in the mortality from aortic aneurysm surgery in the UK when compared with several other European and non-European countries.
Our project will use methods assisting all centres in the adoption of processes and protocols which have been shown to reduce mortality. Guideline protocols for aneurysm repair will be produced with the aid of the specialist societies and publicised with guidelines on this website.
In addition there will be a significant contribution to the project from patients and we will concentrate on auditing and improving patient reported outcomes.
This website forms part of our communications strategy. It allows us to keep clinicians, patients and other stakeholders updated about our project. You can subscribe to our feeds via the link to the right.
This project also maps to the quality standards for the National Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Screening Programme (NAAASP).
