Guidance
The purpose of this guideline is to help healthcare professionals who are not cardiology specialists identify and treat acute myocardial injury and its cardiac complications in adults with known or suspected COVID-19 but without known pre-existing cardiovascular disease.
This guideline focuses on what you need to stop or start doing during the pandemic. Follow the usual professional guidelines, standards and laws (including those on equalities, safeguarding, communication and mental capacity), as described in making decisions using NICE guidelines.
This guideline is for:
- health and care practitioners
- health and care staff involved in planning and delivering services
- commissioners
The guideline covers care in a hospital setting. The recommendations are specifically for acute myocardial injury associated with COVID-19 and should be used alongside good clinical practice.
The recommendations bring together:
- evidence from published literature on COVID-19 with acute myocardial injury
- existing national and international guidance and policies
- advice from specialists working in the NHS from across the UK. These include people with expertise and experience of treating patients with acute myocardial injury during the current COVID-19 pandemic.
NICE has developed these recommendations in direct response to the rapidly evolving situation and so could not follow the standard process for guidance development. The guideline has been developed using the interim process and methods for developing rapid guidelines on COVID-19, and includes a systematic literature search. The evidence tables for this search will be published alongside the guideline. The recommendations are based on evidence and expert opinion and have been verified as far as possible. We will review and update the recommendations as the knowledge base and expert experience develops.
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.