Britain has one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world, yet is so short of cardiologists that a third of all those who have a heart attack do not get to see a heart doctor, the medical profession said yesterday.
Cardiologist numbers in Britain need to be almost doubled, from 630 to 1,200, says a report by the British Cardiac Society with the Royal College of Physicians.
The European directive limiting working hours means the numbers will need to rise again, to 1,500 by 2010.
Roger Hall, the main author of the report, said that thousands of lives could be saved if this did occur. "Every year 125,000 people die of coronary heart disease in the UK. Putting it in the thousands would not be unrealistic. That is only a 1% improvement."
James Monro, a consultant cardiac surgeon, said that the trauma and publicity of the Bristol heart babies scandal, which led to doctors being struck off for not revealing to the public that their success rates were worse than other hospitals', had led to severe shortages of children's heart specialists and surgeons.
"The whole media interest following the Bristol events has put people off," he said. "Several paediatric cardiologists have left in the last few years, and some have gone abroad. It is a very stressful job and there are a lot of cardiologists who'd rather have an easy time than be up in the middle of the night telling young parents their baby is going to die, or might be saved by an operation."
Professor Hall said the number of cardiac nurses, technicians, and GPs with cardiac expertise, also needed to be raised. Otherwise, he said, "Some people will not get specialist advice, which can have catastrophic results."
Although the launch in 2000 of the national service framework on the treatment of coronary heart disease led to improvements in services, the scale of the disease, exacerbated by smoking, obesity and the ageing population, has meant cardiologists being overstretched.
Mr Monro said: "We are desperately short of resources, although the government has put a large amount of money in recently. We spend 6.8% of GDP on health, France spends 9.3% and Germany 10.3%. It is not surprising that we have long waiting lists."
The focus of the national service framework, the report says, might be detrimental to the service covering other conditions, such as heart muscle disease, heart rhythm problems, and valvular and congenital heart diseases.
