Mr. Tim Collins:

We need to a lot to raise awareness among people about the impact their health behaviours can have on their cardiovascular health and to alert them to the various risks in their health. We concur with Mr. Johnson that we need a comprehensive national prevention strategy. It needs to start with what we call the commercial and social determinants of health. We tend to place significant emphasis in this country on individual responsibility for people's health, whereas we need to start much further back.

There are quite a number of structural issues to do with health inequality and people living in poverty and disadvantage, as well as people being assailed by from all quarters by inappropriate marketing, especially children, in terms of junk food marketing. Until we begin to seriously address many of these commercial determinants of health, we will not make great inputs in terms of impacting on cardiovascular health, just by increasing awareness.

More needs to be done in that area. We need to resource Healthy Ireland more effectively. Its budget this year is €20 million. That is up from approximately €5 million, out of a total health budget of €20 billion, which is, quite plainly, a ridiculous amount to suspend on primary prevention. A hypertension campaign needs to be prioritised. We are in discussions with the Department of Health and Sláintecare about a full-scale national hypertension awareness campaign to encourage people to get their blood pressure checked.

With regard to heart failure, the Senator Kyne is correct. Approximately 90,000 in this country are living with heart failure. They are largely unrecognised and there are few facilities for people living in the community with heart failure, in terms of helping them with self-management. We have a new programme, which we began less than a year ago, supported by the HSE, to help people and to give them the information and support they require to help them to manage their condition. However, it is a significantly under-recognised condition and we need to do much more, both at acute service level and in terms of community support, for people living with the condition.