Mr. Chris Macey:

As for one thing we could do, the Irish Heart Foundation has been running a national blood pressure awareness campaign for the last couple of years. We need the State to get involved in that to do it on a much bigger level. We are a small organisation and we can only do so much on these things. We talked to the Sláintecare office previously. We talked to the HSE about doing this. It is something that really badly needs to be done. High blood pressure is a major risk factor in more than half of all heart disease yet a survey was done of 12 richer countries, including Ireland, in which we came last in terms of awareness, treatment and control of blood pressure in both men and women. Out of 12 countries, we had the second worst level of impact of high blood pressure for men and fourth worst for women. We are doing really badly in this area. If there was just one thing the State could do, this would probably have as much impact as anything else. Doing that would be really important.

We worked with the HSE this year on the Act F.A.S.T. campaign because less than 50% of people who have a stroke are getting into hospital in time to get the life-saving treatment. It is really good that the HSE supported a campaign that we ran together. If these campaigns just last one year, however, they do not have impact. They have to be run over a number of years to really land with people and hardwire that awareness into the national consciousness. We do cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR, training in schools for 85% of the secondary schools in Ireland. We are training 200,000 schoolchildren in CPR across Ireland every year. We are progressively hardwiring that awareness of how to save a life into people's consciousness. Therefore, for the first time in terms of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, there were 200 saves this year in Ireland, which is amazing. What we are seeing now having started this campaign in 2015, for example, is that we are getting examples of teachers and pupils saving lives in schools. That is the type of approach that is required. It is that constant reminder and keeping that awareness to the forefront of people's minds.