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About the guideline
BHF is proud to lead a UK-wide partnership comprising of 10 professional societies, 5 charities and key stakeholders. The project is now underway and aims to deliver the UK’s first ‘living’ clinical guideline for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD).
This forward-thinking guideline will leverage advanced digital platforms and methodologies to allow for rapid integration of emerging evidence. This will ensure that our guidance remains consistently relevant.
By uniting expertise from clinical, academic and charitable fields, the guideline will set a new standard for evidence-based cardiovascular disease prevention across the UK. The inaugural guideline is scheduled for publication in January 2027.
However, our ambition does not end there. We are committed to integrating these recommendations into clinical practice. Our goal is to develop decision-making tools, to be used by doctors and other healthcare professionals, to make it easier for everyone to interpret the guideline’s recommendations. This will help to improve every patient’s access to evidence-based care.
Why is a new guideline needed?
Our populations are ageing, more diverse and surviving with increasing multimorbidity. Ironically, the pace and magnitude of this change reflects the success of modern medicine in improving life expectancy, but this is becoming its greatest challenge.
Health care systems across the world are struggling with the increasing volume and complexity of the diseases they now face. Unfortunately, when health systems become stretched, the poorest in society are the most affected.
As a result, inequalities in health outcomes are widening. Most notable is the widening gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest in society – much of which is due to the burden of cardiovascular disease.
The prevention of cardiovascular disease, therefore, has never been more relevant or important. But current approaches are inadequate. New systems of care have never been more needed to better detect people at risk of cardiovascular diseases and deliver more effective means to prevent it.
We need to better understand how to tailor these approaches for cardiovascular disease prevention, to improve the care of hard-to-reach groups in society. To support new models of care, we need provide a template for our strategies to improve CVD prevention, through a new clinical practice guideline (CPG).
Our ambition
Updating the guideline on CVD prevention alone is not enough. We need to transform our approach to developing the guideline, so it is regularly updated as new evidence emerges. We will embrace the opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a ‘living’ guideline that paves the way for transforming the approach to CVD prevention in the UK.
How we will achieve it
Professor Bryan Williams, BHF Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, is chairing the Guideline Development Group (GDG), with Professor David Wood acting as Deputy Chair. A full list of the members of the GDG is included below.
The inaugural meeting of the GDG was held on 20 October 2025. A series of meetings will be held throughout 2026.
A Stakeholder Group (membership list below) has been set up to critique the outputs from the GDG. A panel of people with lived experience has also been set up and they are represented on both the GDG and the Stakeholder Group.
Kleijnen Systematic Reviews Ltd has been commissioned to support the GDG in the development of the guideline. They will carry out the systematic reviews and all associated academic work, including drafting the guideline.
Who is involved?
Our partners
The organisations listed above are involved in the development of the guideline, either as members of the Guideline Development Group, the Stakeholder Group or both.
Individual group members
Latest project outputs
The protocol that will form the foundation for the guideline was discussed at the GDG meeting on 20 October 2025.
How is the project funded?
BHF is funding all costs associated with this programme of work.
Feedback and questions
We welcome feedback on the work carried out to date. Please contact us by email at [email protected].
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