Mr. Mark O'Donnell:

That survey was a targeted campaign we ran in Mayo. I think the age cohort was 45-plus for most of the participants. It was run through a pharmacy, so it was kind of an opportunistic screening and people went in of their own accord to get checked. The interesting thing is that what clinicians will often describe as the rule of halves is very much borne out. Half of the people checked as part of that process had elevated blood pressure on the day of the check, and of that 50% who had high blood pressure, half of those were completely unaware of it. That is concerning, given the impact of hypertension as a risk factor.

There is an important point to be made on the previous question about prevention. We focus much on and talk about prevention, risk-factor management, risk-factor modification and things such as that – this is very much in line with the Heart Foundation’s recent paper on prevention – but there is a need to go back much further than that in terms of the long-term piece that we are not doing. When we do public policy planning outside of the strict confines of health, we tend not to use a health lens when developing policy, which is a huge failing. In my opening statement, I mentioned integrating health considerations into things like spatial planning and land use planning. How we plan, build and structure our communities is not included in any consideration at the moment and that is a massive gap. Particularly, looking into the long term, we will never be able to get ahead of the problem and be reactive. We will be stuck in conversations about headcount, posts and all the rest of it unless we get out in front of the problem and take much broader policy actions with regard to integrating that health lens into public policy.