Professor Brendan McAdam:

I thank the Deputy for those questions. A recent European national audit or survey of provision of cardiovascular services and care has been published in one of the heart journals in the past year. Sadly, we have very few statistics or data to offer that registry or survey so we cannot compare our data, because we do not have good data, with what is published in Europe. We know, however, based on our experience, that we are not very good. We have the lowest number of cardiologists per capita in Europe, and only 20% of our cardiology team are women. The only audit data we have in registry form is for heart attacks. We know we do not do as well for provision of care, treatment of hypertension, treatment of cholesterol, and provision of adequate cardiac imaging centres and services to our patients. There is a lot of room for improvement. However, as regards one of the biggest obstacles we have, one of our missions is to try to adopt registries that will allow us to measure what we do so we can actually assess what we are doing, benchmark against our colleagues in Europe and then identify areas for improvement. That would then also allow us to be able to resource services adequately to provide the best care we can provide for our patients. In particular, we do not have any data on gender disparities of care in this country but we know such disparities arise based on data from around Europe.