Evaluating the effectiveness of the cardiovascular assessment screening program with nurse practitioners and patients: results of a cluster randomised controlled trial.

Background: There is inconsistent utilisation of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for cardiovascular disease (CVD) screening and management by healthcare professionals to identify CVD risk factors early and to intervene using current recommendations. To address this issue, the Cardiovascular Assessment Screening Program (CASP) was developed, implemented, and evaluated. This manuscript reports on the second phase of an exploratory sequential mixed methods study that tested the effectiveness of the CASP with nurse practitioners (NPs) and patients in Canada.

Methods: A two-armed, non-blinded, cluster randomised controlled trial (cRCT) compared the NP-led implementation of CASP with usual care by NPs in community practice clinics across one Canadian province. The NPs were the cluster variable as their screening practices could be affected by their educational training, resources, or other factors. NPs were eligible for inclusion in the study if they were located in different urban and rural community settings and could conduct follow-up visits with patients. NPs recruited and enrolled the patients from their own practices as participants if they were healthy individuals, aged 40-74 years, with no established CVD or vascular disease. Researchers randomly allocated the NPs (n = 10) to the intervention group (IG) or the control group (CG).

Results: Eight (8) NPs and 167 patients participated in the cRCT study. Patient participant-level data were analysed by the originally assigned groups IG (n = 68) and CG (n = 99). Utilising GLM (generalized linear modeling) more IG patients (90%; n = 61) received comprehensive CVD screening compared to the CG patients (2%; n = 2), RR = 30.2, 95% CI [8.76, 103.9], p < .0001, controlling for the effect of NP and BP category.

Conclusion: NP implementation of CASP was effective for comprehensive screening compared to usual care and led to identifying previously unknown CVD risk factors, calculated FRS, heart health priorities and personalised goal-setting.

Trial Registration: ClinicalTrial.gov ID#: NCT03170752, date of registration 2017/05/31.