Heart attack admissions to hospital down by 5,000

THOUSANDS of heart attack patients missed out on life-saving treatment during lockdown, and may have died or been left with serious disabilities, analysis has found.

By the end of May there had been 5,000 fewer admissions to hospital of those suffering heart attacks than would be expected on average, suggesting many patients stayed away despite being in desperate need.

The research, led by the University of Oxford and NHS Digital, was published in The Lancet and showed that the rate of hospital avoidance peaked at the end of March, when only two thirds of expected admissions of heart attack patients were recorded.

By the start of June, patients with the most serious type of heart attack, caused by a complete blockage of an artery, fell by about a quarter.

The research leader, Dr Marion Mafham, who is a clinical research fellow at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, said: “We can’t tell how many of the [missing] 5,000 heart attack sufferers have died because they didn’t get treatment in hospital, but we know that this will have caused avoidable deaths.

“People with heart attacks who do not receive treatment in hospital are at risk of damage to the heart muscle leading to long-term heart failure or suffering a further life-threatening heart attack later.”

Yesterday, new data from the Office for National Statistics showed the current death toll for Britain from coronavirus is 55,891.

But the pandemic has undoubtedly claimed far more lives, and there have been 64,000 excess deaths compared with the five-year average, suggesting thousands have died from a lack of medical care.

The number of non-covid excess deaths at home is still not falling. Some 721 more people than expected died at home in the week ending July 3.