AstraZeneca’s Healthy Heart Africa programme set to expand to 10 more countries in Africa | 3News.com

AstraZeneca has announced a planned expansion of its access to healthcare programme, Healthy Heart Africa (HHA), to 10 new countries, starting in 2023.

Hypertension, commonly known as high blood pressure, is the most important modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular diseases.

HHA contributes to strengthening health systems by working in partnership with local stakeholders to provide services such as free blood pressure screening, creating education and awareness about cardiovascular diseases and their risk factors, providing blood pressure screening equipment and training healthcare workers on guidelines to improve the quality of care}

Since 2014, the programme has conducted over 30.5 million blood pressure screenings and trained more than 9,900 healthcare workers.

Because the programme integrates into existing healthcare systems to provide blood pressure screening and other related services, we are able to boost preventive healthcare for hypertension

Through community-based interventions and routine screening for blood pressure for all who walk through the activated facilities, we are able to identify cases of elevated blood pressure and refer them for diagnosis

The expansion will contribute to HHA’s ambition to reach 10 million people with elevated blood pressure across Africa by 2025.