The British Heart Foundation (BHF) spells out the plain facts of how important it is for us to look after the health of our hearts. However sadly, heart disease will still kill around one in four people in the UK. Here are some of the key statistics:

• Heart and circulatory diseases cause 25% of all deaths in the UK, that’s an astounding 160,000 plus deaths per year. This equates to an average of 460 deaths daily - one every three minutes!
• The most widespread type of heart disease in the UK is coronary heart disease (CHD; also referred to as ischaemic heart disease). It is the most common cause of heart attacks and notably the single biggest killer of both and men and women globally in 2019.
• We have as many as 100,000 hospital admissions each year in the UK due to heart attacks. On average, one every five minutes.
• Strokes also account for 34,000 deaths in the UK each year and are the single biggest contributor to severe disability in the UK.
• More than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur in the UK each year - a survival rate of less than 1 in 10.

Heart attacks occur when the flow of blood to part of the heart suddenly becomes blocked, usually this is called a blood clot. You can find out how to react and the signs to look for. There is a very informative YouTube video on the St John Ambulance website which shows how to help someone who is having a heart attack.

As an organisation you could train and teach your staff how to carry out CPR. The BHF have a superb help tool called RevivR which can teach cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in 15 minutes for free. As well as the initial training, this tool can be kept on your mobile phone in order to assist in the event of actually administrating CPR to a colleague, friend, stranger or family member.

The training also teaches you how to use a defibrillator and where you can find one if there is not one readily to hand. All employers should consider purchasing a defibrillator as this simple piece of equipment to use that can save lives. An Automated External Defibrillator (AED) or defibrillator is a life saving device that can help save the life of someone experiencing a sudden cardiac arrest. They are easy to use, portable, with clear step-by-step instructions so anyone can use them, from a bystander to a trained professional.

Clearly there are many steps that we can all take to reduce the chances of suffering from coronary heart disease. Employers and employees alike can all take steps to put in place preventative measures that can improve the health of the working population. The most effective way is to make lifestyle changes as detailed on the NHS website.

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