A chance to live (From The Northern Echo)

A chance to live

8:41am Friday 13th October 2006 in A Chance To Live

THESE days, patients in the North-East who need heart surgery can expect to have their operation within weeks of seeing a surgeon. Thanks to massive investment in the region's heart units, long waits of up to 18 months for heart surgery are now a thing of the past.

At James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough the past few years has seen the transformation of heart surgery services. The hospital, which serves Teesside, South Durham and a large part of North Yorkshire, has seen the creation of extra operating theatres and ward space and the appointment of more specialist staff.

It was in May last year that The Northern Echo exclusively revealed that no one in the region was waiting longer than three months for heart surgery, including the wait to be diagnosed at a local hospital after being referred by a GP.

Similar improvements have taken place at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, which serves North Durham, Wearside, Tyneside and Northumberland, leading to an expansion in the number of heart bypass operations performed and the dramatic reduction in waiting times.

In the last year heart specialists at the two regional centres have been able to reduce waiting times even further and now patients usually can expect to wait for a matter of weeks rather than months to have bypass surgery. Because of improvements in the use of angioplasty - inflating tiny balloons inside the arteries to improve blood flow rather than undergoing open-heart surgery - many patients can now be treated in this way, avoiding invasive surgery and a long recovery time.

It is a far cry from the situation in 2000 when The Northern Echo launched its Chance To Live campaign.

The campaign was triggered by the death of Northern Echo photographer Ian Weir, a 38-year-old father-of-two who had a fatal heart attack after he had waited nearly eight months for a triple heart bypass operation.

The Northern Echo initially focused on a call for speedier treatment for patients who needed heart bypass surgery.

This paper's Health Editor, Barry Nelson, went on a fact-finding trip to a modern heart unit in Breda in Holland, where he found that heart patients needing bypasses were admitted within three months, and often much sooner. Surgeons in Breda expressed surprise and horror at the long waits endured in the North-East of England.

But following a multi-million pound investment by the Government - ordered by the then Health Secretary and Darlington MP Alan Milburn - the situation in this region and in the UK as a whole has been transformed in the intervening six years.

However, the Chance To Live lives on and has now been transformed into a campaign to promote exercise and healthy living throughout the region, including a close association with The Great North Walk.