Dear Prime Minister
On behalf of the nation’s leading heart charity, I’d like to offer congratulations on your appointment. Representing the 7.6 million people living with heart and circulatory diseases, the British Heart Foundation urges you to work with us in the pursuit of a healthier nation.
Cardiovascular services were already under immense pressure before the pandemic, with mounting backlogs and persistent workforce shortages exacerbating this, and existing inequalities widening. A recovery to pre-pandemic levels is not enough to build a future free from the fear of heart and circulatory diseases. We must do better, go faster, reach further
– it is no exaggeration to say that people’s lives are on the line right now.
Getting the NHS back on the front foot
We welcome that tackling access to care is one of your top three priorities. From primary care through to A&E, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has stretched every part of our NHS to the limit.
A staggering 337,000 people are on the waiting list for cardiac care today, a number that has risen for 25 consecutive months. To ensure heart patients get the care they so desperately need, we must boost the health workforce to tackle waiting lists. Pledges to increase the retention of doctors, and to entice health workers to return to the NHS, are welcome – but more is needed. The upcoming NHS workforce strategy must be accompanied by the funding required to address shortages in the cardiac workforce.
Supercharging research and development (R&D)
The BHF has funded over £1 billion of research into heart and circulatory diseases since 2010, and helped halve the number of people dying from them in the UK since we were founded in 1961. The pioneering research we fund turns science fiction into reality, but we can only do this if the UK continues to have a world-leading, thriving research environment, with charity research funders like the BHF at its heart.
Medical research charities fund high-risk, high-reward research that attracts world-class talent and drives growth – for every £1 million charity funders spend on R&D in the UK, £1.83 million is added to the economy. We urge you to keep pushing for UK association with Horizon Europe, and commit to investing a minimum of 2.4% of GDP in research.
Bold interventions to tackle the causes of ill health
To build a healthier and more resilient population, we need a renewed focus on preventing the factors that increase someone’s risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases, which still kill one in four people in the UK today. Foremost among these are obesity and smoking. Prevention must be a priority if we are to see an increase in healthy life expectancy. This must, however, take the form of bold interventions to address our obesity crisis, and help reach a Smokefree England by 2030, rather than a focus on personal risk reduction.
We look forward to working with you to safeguard our nation’s health – now and in the future – and harness the UK’s vast research potential. Together, we can move closer to a world without fear of heart and circulatory disease.