Under pressure: hypertension services in SHAPE

Cardiovascular disease is one of the biggest causes of premature death in the country, and high blood pressure significantly increases your chances of developing the disease. Finding and managing cases of hypertension is one of the NHS’s five clinical areas of focus, and pharmacies play a huge part in this.

Pharmacies offering blood pressure checks identify people over the age of 40 who have not previously been diagnosed with hypertension, and offer in-store blood pressure checks. Anyone found to have high blood pressure can then be referred to primary care for further investigation and treatment.

SHAPE can help you monitor pharmacy blood pressure checks in your area, and identify gaps in provision and where pharmacies are over or underperforming.

To see the performance of an individual pharmacy, select the pharmacy in question and select the tab in the pharmacy details which says ‘Blood pressure check service’.

You’ll be able to monitor the following:

• Whether the pharmacy is signed up to provide blood pressure checks

• How long they pharmacy has been signed up

• Monthly and cumulative activity, including how many patients they’ve checked, the type of check (whether they’re opportunistic checks, i.e. the pharmacy has checked someone who’s walked into the pharmacy, rather than being referred), and how the number has changed from the previous month.

You can also cross-check the hypertension data against other datasets available in SHAPE, for instance overlaying the Core20 information to show areas which have a high level of deprivation.

This can enable you to target promotion of blood pressure checks where they’re needed most, and identify if certain demographic groups are underserved.

All this information is available on SHAPE Place, which is free to use for the public sector, or available to subscribe to for the private sector. Log in to SHAPE Place.

If you’re interested in improving pharmacy provision in your area, find out how you can monitor pharmacy contraception services in SHAPE.