Mr. Chris Macey:

What we are lacking, in the absence of a proper national cardiac register, is real-time data. People representing cancer services were before the committee last week. There is a national cancer registry, which provides real-time data that just does not exist for us. As has been said, waiting times for outpatients for echocardiograms and angiograms are months long and getting longer. We get a snapshot of that. We hear about what is happening in an individual hospital, but we never get a full clear and consistent picture of what is going on.

There is a heart attack audit and registers are being done by individual cardiologists for some specific conditions, but there is a dearth of regular real-time data to inform health planning. Service delivery impact and cost-effectiveness cannot be maximised clearly when we do not know what is happening, or what is and is not working, and if there is no fast alert system when problems arise, as they do regularly in individual hospitals and collectively on things like waiting lists. As far as we are concerned, this is something that has to be front and centre of a new national cardiovascular strategy.