Heart Health Screen

Our healthy heart screen is an accumulation of several of our services combined into a 20 to 25 minute sitting with a member of our pharmacist team. The services covered in this screen include:

• Cholesterol
• Diabetes
• Blood Pressure
• BMI
• Haemoglobin
• Lifestyle

Why get a healthy heart screen?

This service was designed to give people a convenient, locally accessible (including weekends and bank holidays) broad screen of the main areas that are looked at for cardiovascular disease.

Over the years our service has identified people with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and people who were anaemic who were unaware they were at risk. Many of the main chronic cardiovascular diseases are called the silent killers as they have little or no symptoms.

Based on the results, we follow Irish Heart Foundation guidelines in referring you appropriately to your doctor, if required.

Another good reason to avail of a healthy heart screen is if your doctor, nurse, dietician or other health care professional has commenced a new regimen of medicine or lifestyle changes with you and you want to assess your progress.

Conveniently, the healthy heart screen is available when booked on weekends or bank holidays so you don’t need to miss work to get this screen.

What’s involved in a healthy heart screen?

 We schedule an appointment (usually a morning) and ask you to come fasting (because of the cholesterol and diabetes screen). If you have to take medicine in the morning, you can do this as normal with a glass of water.

In the privacy of our consultation room, the pharmacist will further explain the service and obtain your signed consent to proceed. Consent is required because we take a small amount of blood from your finger to run in the analysers.

Once the blood has been taken and is running in the analyser, we will perform the non-blood screens and checks.

The analyser takes approximately 8 to 10 minutes to run the blood work.

The pharmacist will record all the results.

The pharmacist will finally discuss all results with you and discuss necessary next steps before you leave.

Check out the videos in cholesterol and blood pressure for further explanation.

Is the healthy heart screen accurate?

 The diagnostic machines used for our screening services are Gold Standard machines. They are internally and externally quality control validated. Our brand of cholesterol machine was independently validated by Tallaght Hospital to show no clinically significant different against lab results.^{^}

Despite the level of assurance we can provide in our process, we always stress that our services are only screening services. They are not meant to replace tests undertaken by your doctor.

At Marron’s Pharmacy, we offer screening services to make screening of certain diseases more accessible to people, especially when people are not able to or are unwilling to take time off to visit their doctor.

^{^} Validation of a point of care lipid analyser using a hospital based reference laboratory. Carey M et al Depts of Cardiology and Chemical Pathology, The Adelaide and Meath Hospital incorporating the National Children’s Hospital, Dublin. Irish Journal of Medical Science, Vol 145. Number 4, 2006.