New Study Suggests Thousands Of Fatalities Could Have Been Prevented

Thousands of people die unnecessarily every year after a heart attack due to poor NHS follow-up care, according to a new study.

Leading medical negligence experts at national law firm Irwin Mitchell has labelled the findings ‘worrying’ and called for protocols to be put in place that ensure everyone receives the right level of  aftercare following such a serious health scare.

The findings, by academics from Leeds University and University College London, have been published today (Tuesday 10 May) in the European Heart Journal: Acute Cardiovascular Care.

They involve the 40,000 people a year who suffer from the most common form of heart attack, a non-ST elevation myocardial infarction.

The study found that 85% of these patients missed out on at least one of the treatments that have been proven to reduce their risk of having another heart attack.

According to researchers, those failures and an “unacceptable deficit in care” led to 33,000 avoidable deaths between 2003 and 2013 in England and Wales.

Dr Chris Gale, an associate professor of cardiovascular health sciences at the Leeds Institute of cardiovascular and metabolic medicine and the lead author of the report said: “What we’ve highlighted here is the unacceptable deficit in the care being given to people after they’ve had an NSTEMI heart attack.

“We calculate that roughly one patient per month, per hospital in England and Wales is losing their life as a direct consequence of this deficit”,

Guy Forster, a medical negligence specialist, feels that whilst there have been improvements over the years, more needs to be done to prevent an avoidable loss of lives.