Professor Brendan McAdam:

At the top of the scale are France, Germany and Sweden, which provide superb cardiovascular care in all its facets. Cardiovascular disease is a spectrum of diseases including heart failure, heart attacks, endocarditis and hypertension. Those countries do very well in terms of benchmarking. How we know how we do is that we adopt practices based on guidelines of best practice that are adopted by the European Society of Cardiology. In fact, two of our members have been chairmen of two specific areas of disease, hypertension and coronary disease, to advance the practice of cardiovascular care. We know from best practices that we are not living up to what we should do. Treatment of hypertension is suboptimal, treatment of high cholesterol is suboptimal and access to services is very poor. For example, the waiting list for an outpatient echo or CT scan is anything from six months to two years. That is really unacceptable. It is very hard for us to provide that kind of care where we do not have access to proper investigations to make the diagnosis to make people better.