Government must take charge of the heart and stroke care crisis
Latest British Heart Foundation (BHF) analysis reveals that we are on the cusp of a devastating milestone.
There have been nearly 100,000 more deaths involving cardiovascular disease than we’d usually expect since the onset of the pandemic in England alone. That’s 100,000 more people who have lost their lives, all too often in distressing circumstances, and 100,000 more families who have endured the terrible pain of losing a loved one.
This stark statistic should serve as a sobering moment for our political leaders. We must not stand by and accept excess deaths as an inevitable phenomenon without any clear solutions. It should instead galvanise us to act now to bring this ongoing tragedy to a halt and give heart patients hope of a better and healthier future.
Extreme pressure
To understand how Government can bring the cardiovascular disease crisis under control, we need to understand which factors are still contributing to such tragic loss of life.
In the first year of the pandemic, we saw the Covid-19 infection drive high numbers of excess deaths involving cardiovascular disease. Since then, deaths from Covid-19 have fallen year-on-year, and in the third, most recent, year of the pandemic, less than a third of excess deaths involving cardiovascular conditions appear to have been attributable to acute Covid-19 infection.
What this means is that despite the fall in deaths directly attributable to Covid-19, the number of deaths involving cardiovascular conditions remains high above expected levels. This is deeply troubling, and leads us to think that other major factors are also driving the continued increase in levels of excess deaths involving cardiovascular disease.
One of these factors is likely to be the extreme and ongoing disruption to emergency and routine NHS heart care. Long waits for heart care are not just agonising for patients – they are dangerous and are unlikely to go away in the near term.
Waiting a long time for heart care puts someone at increased risk of avoidable hospital admission, disability due to heart failure, and premature death. Yet latest figures show that in England alone the number of people waiting for time-sensitive cardiac care was at a record high of nearly 393,000 at the end of May 2023, and more than one in three people on the waiting list are waiting longer than the maximum 18-week target for treatment.
Emergency care has also been significantly affected. Every second counts when someone has a heart attack, and average ambulance response times for suspected heart attacks and strokes have been above 30 minutes in all but one month since the beginning of 2022, and in December 2022 they even breached 90 minutes.
Waiting a long time for heart care puts someone at increased risk of avoidable hospital admission, disability due to heart failure, and premature death.
The pandemic has caused significant disruption to the detection and management of conditions that put millions of people at much greater risk of a heart attack or stroke, like high blood pressure. The NHS has prioritised the prevention of cardiovascular disease in its recovery efforts, but such measures all too often take a back seat in times of pressure, and we cannot allow this to happen.
Cardiovascular disease is already one of the nation’s biggest killers, and if little changes, we risk reversing decades of progress, taking countless lives. We can’t accept this – heart patients need and deserve better.
Beyond recovery
But there is hope. Politicians across the political divide have recognised the scale and urgency of this complex challenge, and we are seeing the green shoots of promising action.
In the last year, the Government has announced that cardiovascular disease will be a focus of its upcoming Major Conditions Strategy. Meanwhile, Labour has pledged to significantly reduce deaths from heart attack and stroke by 25 per cent over the next decade if the Party is elected to Government. There is innovative thinking underway to re-imagine urgent and emergency care pathways to make them more responsive to patient need and, meanwhile, NHS staff are working tirelessly to whittle down waiting lists.
These commitments are welcome, but they won't translate into immediate action for the people who need care now. If we want to stop this heart care crisis in its tracks, we need bold and co-ordinated action on three fronts.
Making NHS heart care a priority, with specific plans for cardiovascular disease that identify and address NHS cardiac staffing gaps so patients get the care they need more quickly;
Improving the prevention of the causes of cardiovascular disease, with a focus on the drivers of health inequalities such as obesity and smoking;
Supercharging cardiovascular research to unlock groundbreaking treatments and cures of the future.
There is no time to waste in getting this right – this requires a strong course of action today. With the next general election in sight, we urge politicians to seize this opportunity to stand up and deliver for the 5.9 million people in England living with heart and circulatory diseases.
Learn more: https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-public-affairs/excess-deaths-involving-cardiovascular-disease-an-analysis
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