Why Being First Across the Line to Detect Heart Failure Matters | Heart Failure Unfiltered

Heart failure affects over 900,000 people in the UK, yet it remains one of the most underdiagnosed conditions in primary care. Too many patients are only identified after a hospital admission - often following months or years of missed opportunities. This episode asks a simple but urgent question: why aren't we catching it sooner?

In this episode of Heart Failure Unfiltered, Nick Hartshorne-Evans, founder and CEO of the Pumping Marvellous Foundation - the UK's leading heart failure patient charity - sits down with three experts at the heart of a groundbreaking education initiative. Together, they explore what happened when the Pumping Marvellous Foundation partnered with Health Innovation Northwest Coast to deliver the Marvellous Masterclass - a series of education events designed to upskill over 170 non-specialist clinicians in heart failure awareness, detection, and management.

You'll learn:

- Why heart failure is so frequently missed in primary care - and the clinical, historical, and systemic reasons behind it

- How the BEAT acronym (Breathlessness, Exhaustion, Ankle swelling, Time for an NT-proBNP) gives clinicians a simple, actionable framework for recognising symptoms

- Why NT-proBNP should be the first-line diagnostic step - and why confusion around diagnostic pathways has led to widespread inconsistency

- What the Marvellous Masterclass events revealed about baseline knowledge levels among non-specialist clinicians — and why that finding matters

- How bringing patient educators into a clinical education setting transformed engagement and recall

- What a delayed diagnosis looks like from a patient's perspective — in this case, a respiratory arrest, three months in hospital, and a life that had to be rebuilt from the ground up

Meet the guests:

🎙 Katie: diagnosed with cardiomyopathy and heart failure at 25, Katie became a Pumping Marvellous patient educator and shares her experience of years of missed diagnoses before reaching crisis point.

🎙 Dr. Sue Kemsley: a GP with 30 years of experience, a GPSI in cardiology, and clinical lead roles at Health Innovation Northwest Coast and the Northwest Coast Cardiac Network. Sue brings essential perspective on how heart failure education has evolved — and where the gaps still exist.

🎙 Sarah Coburn: senior programme manager at Health Innovation Northwest Coast, leading a two-year heart failure programme. Sarah breaks down what the masterclass data revealed and why embedding learning into clinical practice is essential.

Key takeaways for clinicians:

Heart failure is treatable — but only if it's found. The evidence is clear: patients with undiagnosed heart failure are circulating through healthcare systems, often with multiple conditions, seeing various professionals, without anyone connecting the dots. This episode makes the case that upskilling the wider workforce — not just specialists — is one of the most impactful interventions we can make. A curious, open mind, a willingness to challenge your initial hypothesis, and knowledge of a few simple tools could be the difference between a patient being diagnosed early or arriving at A&E in crisis.

This is Episode 1 of a four-part series. Future episodes will continue to explore the question that runs through every conversation: beat the diagnosis.

🫀 Support patients living with heart failure: pumpingmarvellous.org

📩 Find out more about the Marvellous Masterclass and upcoming events at pumpingmarvellous.org

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