This test is ridiculous. Try it. PHE's tool tells a woman in her 30s that her heart age is older than her real age because she's not had her cholesterol done. And tells her to get her cholesterol done by GP. There is no evidence for this, pointless excess GP workload...
...this strikes me as a good example of an NHS / public sector organisation having a fun initial idea for turning some boring coefficients into a "digital app" for public engagement, but lacking the skills to do the user-testing / sense-checking needed to deliver a working tool..
... I'm absolutely certain that PHE will weather any minor storm from people concerned by these errors, and brush off all reasonable criticisms. They've had a day in the media, so success. But I'm concerned for what this says about the ability of org's like PHE to make...
... the best choices about trade-offs between media impact and quality of work; and the ability to ship working digital tools rather than fun stuff that sort-of works. It'll be interesting to see how they respond to criticisms of the errors in this tool over the week.
I will also be interested to see if anyone is aiming to monitor, and cost up, the incidence of totally unnecessary GP consultations by women in their 30s who have been incorrectly told by PHE's app today that they must go to their GP to get their cholesterol done. Not cheap.
To re-iterate this thread. There are 8.7 million people in the UK in their 30s. This PHE "heart age" tool seems to be incorrectly telling them ALL to go to their GP to get their cholesterol checked. If only one in 100 do so, that's 87,000 pointless GP consultations. Expensive.
