THE maximum wait for heart surgery in England will be three months by the end of March, it will be announced today.

The announcement by the country's heart tsar, Dr Roger Boyle, will mean that the target set by The Northern Echo's Chance To Live campaign six years ago will have been hit.

The campaign was launched in 1999 at a time when UK heart patients routinely waited 18 months for surgery.

It aimed to close the gap between England and Western Europe, where heart patients were operated on within three months.

Speaking ahead of today's announcement, Dr Boyle told The Northern Echo: "We are very close."

Dr Boyle was appointed as the national director for heart disease by former Health Secretary and Darlington MP Alan Milburn, in 2000.

He said: "We have got about 800 bypass operations to clear across the country from now until the end of the month, and then we will be there. That is fantastic."

The Chance To Live campaign was set up in 1999 after the death of 38-year-old Darlington father-of-two Ian Weir, who had waited eight months to see a surgeon to fix a date for surgery.

Apart from hitting the three-month target, new figures released exclusively to The Northern Echo show that deaths from heart disease are falling rapidly.

Across the North-East, hundreds of lives have been saved because of better treatment.

Some of the largest falls in death rates from cardiovascular disease have occurred in the region. Dr Boyle, a former heart specialist at York hospital, singled out Durham Dales Primary Care Trust for particular praise for reducing heart deaths.

With a 39 per cent reduction in the local cardiovascular mortality rate, Durham Dales has seen the second biggest fall in the country.

Dr Boyle said: "The Durham Dales set-up is an example for all primary care services in the country. Basically, they are the gold standard against which everyone should measure themselves."

Leading The Way, a five-year progress report, sets out the progress that has been made since the late 1990s.

Apart from plummeting death rates, health inequalities between different parts of England are narrowing, waiting times for treatment are reducing and diagnosis is improving.

Across England, the average reduction in death rates from cardiovascular disease among the under-75s has fallen by 27 per cent since 1996.

But falls of more than 30 per cent have been recorded across the region, including Chester-le-Street (39 per cent) and Derwentside (36 per cent), both County Durham; Hambleton, North Yorkshire (35 per cent); Middlesbrough (32 per cent), and Redcar (32 per cent).

Dr Boyle also welcomed the announcement this week that The Great North Walk will take place in Weardale in July.

The eight-mile walk is organised by Wear Valley District Council and backed by the Durham Dales PCT and Northumbrian Water, under the Chance To Live banner.

"The individual must do his or her bit towards heart health, and that includes healthy food and taking regular exercise," said Dr Boyle.

Other highlights of the statistics include:

* Prescribing of life-saving statin drugs has risen by 30 per cent every year. The drug is saving 9,000 lives (including an estimated 220 in County Durham and Tees Valley).

* The number of patients referred by GPs with symptoms of heart problems has doubled since 2000.

* The NHS has helped 21,000 people to quit smoking for at least four weeks (including 25,619 in County Durham and Tees Valley).

The James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough, has been selected as one of seven sites where the use of angioplasty as the preferred treatment for cardiovascular disease, rather than surgery, is to be trialled.

The Government has also announced proposals to improve the diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of people with abnormal heart beats and introduce improved support and treatment for relatives of victims of sudden adult death syndrome.

The British Heart Foundation welcomed the report. Its medical director, Professor Peter Weissberg, said: "The report shows great progress, but it has only enabled us to catch up to where we should have been many years ago.

"John Reid (the Health Secretary) says we are now in the 'middle of the pack' for heart disease in Europe and no longer the sick man of Europe. But this 'pack' includes Eastern European countries, which are experiencing major problems with heart disease.

"Coronary heart disease is still the UK's single biggest killer, and we are still worse off than most of Western Europe."

George Watson, 70, whose life was saved by powerful heart drugs after a heart att-ack, said: "It's fantastic news that so much is being done for heart patients."

The former engineering designer can now live a near-normal life with his wife, Diana, 68, at their home in Mowden, Darlington.

Read more about the Chance to Live campaign here.