UPTAKE AND RESULTS OF THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE ENGLAND COMMUNITY PHARMACY HYPERTENSION CASE-FINDING SERVICE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of premature death in England. The greatest risk factor for cardiovascular disease is hypertension- an estimated 5.5 million people have undiagnosed hypertension in England. To address the burden of hypertension, the National Health Service (NHS) implemented a community pharmacy hypertension case-finding service in October 2021. The aim of this cross-sectional study is to evaluate the uptake of this service since its implementation. Design and method: Individuals eligible for the pharmacy hypertension case-finding service included those: (i) aged 40 years or older without a diagnosis of hypertension; (ii) aged under 40 years with a family history of hypertension; (iii) aged between 35 and 39 years at the discretion of pharmacy staff; or (iv) adults of any age with or without a hypertension diagnosis referred to a pharmacist by their general practitioner. Patients with pharmacy blood pressure (BP) readings between 140/90 and 179/89 mmHg were eligible for follow-up 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM). The primary outcome was the uptake of clinic BP and ABPM checks. Data describing the participating pharmacies and uptake of the service are collected by the NHS. Results: Data were collected between October 2021 and September 2024. Of approximately 11,000 pharmacies in England, an estimated 9,000 pharmacies (82%; 9,000/11,000) registered for the hypertension case-finding service, and 6,450 of the registered pharmacies (59%; 6,450/11,000) provided the service to individuals. Among an estimated cohort of 16 million people potentially eligible for this service, the uptake of the community pharmacy clinic BP check service was 23% (3,670,495/16,000,000). There were 1,326,446 individuals with BP results between 140/90 and 179/89 mmHg and thus eligible for ABPM. The uptake of ABPM follow-up was 21% (271,887/1,326,446). Conclusions: Following the implementation of a community pharmacy hypertension case-finding service in England, one in five eligible patients received a pharmacy BP check, and one in five eligible patients received a follow-up ABPM check. Future efforts to understand facilitators and barriers to service uptake, as well as the clinical outcomes of pharmacy hypertension case-finding are warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".