Jersey Heart Team

Jersey is an island of a hundred thousand people. It is also one of only seven centres the British Society for Heart Failure chose to lead its national heart failure programme. The others are large teaching hospitals.

That happened because the team stopped exporting the problem. Cardiac MRI is now done here, so patients no longer fly to Oxford for a scan. Suspected heart failure gets a blood test and an answer within 48 hours instead of a fortnight. One patient in his fifties, too breathless to manage the stairs, was back at work the following week.

The research follows the same rule: ask the questions that are actually in front of us. Nine studies are open, most of them with the University of Oxford. Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Weight loss as a treatment. Lipoprotein(a), an inherited risk almost nobody measures. Atrial fibrillation picked up by a wrist watch. The Jersey Heart Failure Registry recorded 404 diagnoses in its first eighteen months, and found most of them in clinic rather than in an emergency, which is where around eight in ten used to turn up.

One island, one population, one record. There are very few places where a question can be asked of everybody and answered inside a year. That is why work which starts in Jersey has a real chance of changing practice a long way beyond it.

This page holds what the team uses day to day: referral forms and pathways, guidelines, risk calculators, patient leaflets, and research protocols with their participant information and consent documents. It is written for clinicians working with the service. Patients are welcome to read the leaflets, but nothing here replaces advice from your own clinician.