UiTM Professorial Lecture: Transforming Cardiovascular Risk Management
Cardiovascular diseases (heart attacks and strokes) have been the leading causes of death in Malaysia for the past three decades. This is attributable to the increasing prevalence of major risk factors, such as diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidaemia and obesity, in the Malaysian population. These risk factors are managed in primary care settings. However, management is often suboptimal, leading to the burden of treating complications in secondary care. This alarming trend underscores the pressing need to effectively reorient the Malaysian primary care system to be proactive rather than reactive in meeting the needs of patients with cardiovascular risk factors. Various frameworks have been proposed, with the Chronic Care Model being the most comprehensive and evidence-based. The modell offers a whole-system transformation toward comprehensive, coordinated, continuous, and patient-centred primary care, with the goal of improving outcomes for chronic, long-term conditions. Of the six key components of this model, self-management support has been recognised as the most important. Given this evidence, our research team developed the EMPOWER-SUSTAIN Global Cardiovascular Risk Self-Management Booklet, which was later converted into the EMPOWER-SUSTAIN Self-Management Mobile and Desktop Apps. These apps have transformed cardiovascular risk management in Malaysia's primary care through patient empowerment, ultimately aiming to prevent heart attacks and strokes and save lives.
Instructor Biography
Professor Dr. Anis Safura Ramli is a Professor of Primary Care and a Consultant Family Medicine Specialist at the Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Teknologi MARA. She holds an MBBS from Newcastle University, UK; is a Member of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), UK, a Fellow in Chronic Disease Management, Monash University, Australia, and also a Fellow of the RCGP, UK. She represented Malaysia as a Young Physician Leader in a leadership training and networking program organised by the Inter-Academy Partnership for Health in 2011 and 2016. She has held several leadership positions, including Head of the Department of Primary Care (2005-2015) and Deputy Director and Principal Fellow of I-PPerForM (2017-2023). She is currently the Deputy Dean for Research and Innovation at the Faculty of Medicine.
Professor Dr. Anis is a prominent member of her profession, having served on the councils of the Academy of Family Physicians of Malaysia, the Family Medicine Specialists Association and the Malaysian Society of Hypertension. She was appointed by the Ministry of Health Malaysia to serve as an expert panellist for the restructuring of the Malaysian primary healthcare system. She is a prolific researcher in cardiovascular disease prevention and risk management, having published over 65 scientific papers. Her Scopus h-index is 18 and her Web of Science h-index is 13. She has vast experience leading research teams as a principal investigator for national and international grants. She has won several research and innovation awards at national and international levels, including the UiTM Best Researcher Award at AAU 2020 and the Gold Medal Award at ITEX 2021. She has delivered numerous plenary and symposium lectures at national and international conferences and has established an international research collaboration with the University of Nottingham, UK.
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