7 May 2010 will be a European-wide Heart Failure Awareness Day. This initiative, led by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC)/Heart Failure Association (HFA), is supported by the BSH.

This is to invite you to help make the day a success by arranging a wide variety of activities to raise awareness of heart failure in the wider population. Activities which make people more aware of heart failure could include:

• Lectures to patients, their relatives and the public about heart failure
• A hospital open house – opening up heart failure clinics, demonstrating the use of diagnostic tools and more
• Offer blood pressure measurements (important when discussing heart failure)
• Arranging coffee mornings, competitions, questionnaires, quizzes, etc.
• Notifying the press, radio, TV in advance about activities (if appropriate).

A poster designed to advertise Heart Failure Awareness Day is available here and can be readily printed in its current A4 format (it is low resolution).

If you are having posters printed, there are two choices for high resolution files for use by your professional printing agency (please note that the files are too large for use by normal office computers).  The files can be located on the website ftp://poster:hfad@suivi.ob1.fr. and are named ‘United Kingdom only – Small poster’ and ‘United Kingdom only – Large poster’.

You may wish to use the posters to publicise planned events or simply position the poster where it will be read - in your hospital, surgery, town or village halls and elsewhere – in order to raise awareness of heart failure. The poster flags a useful website which you and your patients with heart failure may find helpful (www.heartfailurematters.org).

We would be grateful if you would let us know how and where you have displayed the poster, and of any activities that you arrange and the interest they attract, so that in due course the BSH can provide feedback to the ESC/HFA. This will be an annual event, so you may also wish to start planning more ambitious projects for next year! To optimise the impact of your efforts for this and future years, please be sure to engage with local networks and patient groups.

Thank you for your help. We look forward to hearing more of your activities. Good luck.