Sparing the pain

Dear Editor,

As a BHF Professor at the Glasgow Cardiovascular Research Centre, I see first-hand how devastating heart disease can be. We are determined to spare more families the pain of losing a loved one to these conditions.

Research funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) has helped halve death rates from heart and circulatory diseases over the past 50 years. So much of our work has only been possible thanks to the amazing individuals who have remembered the BHF in their Will. These special gifts fund more than a quarter of all cardiovascular research in the UK. In the past year people across Scotland left more than £3.8 million in their Wills to the British Heart Foundation to help fund life saving cardiovascular research. I would personally like to honour these people and express our gratitude to their families for making research breakthroughs possible and helping to save thousands of lives.

But there’s still so much more to do, and there are 685,000 people in Scotland living with cardiovascular disease right now. A new study shows that almost a third (31%) of over 65s in Scotland polled said that they would consider leaving a gift in their Will to charity, the top motivations for this included ‘wanting to make a difference’ and it ‘feeling like the right thing to do’.

I would like to say a huge thank you to all those who have already decided to support the BHF in this unique way and encourage more people to consider doing the same, so we can unlock further medical breakthroughs and save more lives. A gift of any size, after you’ve provided for your loved ones, will enable the BHF to continue to fund pioneering research so we can beat heart and circulatory disease for good.

BHF Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine