Heart health checks under threat

Vital heart health test needs to be safeguarded not cut

23 March 2023

The number of Australians undergoing heart health checks could be slashed if changes to MBS funding models go ahead.

Professor Jason Kovacic, Executive Director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, says the Medicare-funded heart health check item is needed more than ever with heart attacks on the rise across the country.

Medicare-funded heart health checks, which can be provided for free by GPs to all adults over 45 years of age, and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over 30 years of age, were introduced in 2019 as a temporary item on the Medical Benefits Schedule.

The future of these heart health checks is now under review with the Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners calling for the removal of Heart Health Assessment items from the Medical Benefits Scheme. Any redirected funding would allow GPs to do longer consultations and not focus on just heart disease.

But the Institute’s Professor Kovacic says these heart health checks should be available to every eligible Australian yearly.

“Heart disease is the biggest killer in Australia and in the first eight months of 2022, we saw 17% more fatal heart attacks than was even predicted. This is not the time to make heart health checks less available to the public," says Professor Kovacic.

“We need to be carrying out more of these potentially life-saving tests and should not be trying to cut back on this program. I fear this will lead to lives being lost unnecessarily.

The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is one of eight heart health groups, including Hearts4heart, which has been strongly advocating to retain heart health checks on the MBS and for its inclusion to be made permanent.

The group is also calling for Auscultation to be added to the Heart Health Test assessment – which would allow GPs to use a stethoscope to listen to the heart and be able to detect conditions such as aortic stenosis – a serious condition that involves narrowing of one of the valves of the heart.

Since heart health checks were introduced four years ago more than 400,000 Australians have had this done – getting their blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol levels tested, and their lifestyle assessed. The heart health checks also calculate the likelihood of having a heart attack within five years and what people can do to reduce their risk. Professor Kovacic adds:

“COVID and all the lockdowns had a significant impact on how many people had this test since it was introduced. It’s lower than we expected but with heart-related issues on the rise, there are hundreds of thousands of Australians who should be getting this test and we need to do everything we can to safeguard and promote it.”

Results from Victor Chang Heart Health Check specialist team, which conducts a community testing service, found the number of people who had abnormal cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure levels had increased from 33% to 47% since the start of COVID-19. A relative 42% increase.

The Institute’s Heart Health Check service is not under threat.

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For all media enquiries and interview requests, please contact:

Julia Timms
Head, Media & Communications
j.timms@victorchang.edu.au
0457 517 355