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Alex Gannaway

Wednesday 10th May 2017

Alex Gannaway, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton, tells us how he encourages his patients to look after themselves after treatment.

Not long now before we set off on our exciting journey from London to the EuroPCR conference in Paris and I couldn’t be more excited. I’m really happy to be on the Heart Valve Voice team and supporting such an important cause. I often work with heart valve disease patients and have seen how life-changing the treatments available can be.

While it is extremely important to raise awareness about the disease itself and its treatment, we also need to focus on ensuring that our patients receive the best care possible, pre and post treatment. One way to ensure that our patients are getting the best help post-care is to give them the knowledge needed for the best recovery. Heart Valve Voice has some great resources on their website and clinicians like myself can provide patients with answers to any questions they may have.

Something that is very important following surgery is to make sure your heart stays healthy. This can be done by eating heart healthy foods and keeping foods that are high in saturated fats, sugar, salt, and sodium to a minimum. Regular exercise, low - moderate impact, depending on your level of recovery is also very important. A healthy heart is a strong heart so keep moving, get out for a walk, do some gardening or light housekeeping, go for a leisurely swim or why not get on your bicycle for a cycle around the neighbourhood.

I hope with this cycle ride we can show that we practice what we preach by keeping fit and by having Pat with us to join the ride at points along the way will also show that valve disease patients don’t need to sit on the sidelines, they can get out and get moving too.

-Alex