SE Academic Review 2023

21 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2023

“ ...these plans are not fit to detect congenital heart disease as there is a lack of screening methods mentioned in them. ”

including reducing high blood pressure and cholesterol levels and changing diet. However, these plans are not fit to detect congenital heart disease as there is a lack of screening methods mentioned in them. The case studies will provide evidence in my essay that increasing the amount of people being scanned will directly reduce cardiac related deaths. I will provide evidence and form a discussion around my proposed thesis statement that ‘More could be done in the UK to limit the impact of cardiovascular diseases’ while making sure I use sufficient information to give a rounded debate on this topic. The British Heart Foundation produced an overview of different cardiovascular heart diseases (British Heart Foundation, 2019). This source gives a clear, wide, overview including details on diagnosis, symptoms and how CVD is treated. However, as the British Heart Foundation website is designed to be read by the general public, this source lacks depth. One article investigating heart screening in sport is titled ‘Cricket Heart Screening at Professional Level’ published by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) (Lubas Medical, 2018). The article gives an overview of why they do the screening and what tests they do to reduce cardiac-related deaths in cricket. This article explains that professional sportsmen are being scanned for heart-related problems and states the reasons for doing so.

I will use case studies from sport to provide evidence of the importance of cardiac screening. These case studies explain the current cardiac testing systems being used within several sports including cricket and football. Some articles I will investigate explain the devastating consequences of heart conditions going undetected. Therefore, through my essay I will argue that not enough is being done nationally to prevent or reduce the number of cardiac deaths. Currently in the UK, the NHS has a long-term plan to try and reduce cardiac-related deaths. This plan consists of several methods of indirectly reducing cardiac deaths and complications Literature Review The NHS Long Term Plan provides a clear and concise explanation of what the NHS is planning on doing to reduce cardiovascular deaths (Kearney, 2019). It lists ways to reduce cardiac deaths using key details, such as the number of deaths, to give evidence of the scale of the problem. This source shows what is being done to prevent cardiac deaths, which has been helpful in researching, however the absence of discussion on heart screening restricts its usefulness when considering my proposed question. The second resource from the NHS, titled ‘Cardiovascular Diseases’ gives information about cardiovascular heart disease, focusing again on figures (NHS, 2020). It highlights speeding up diagnosis as a key area which will reduce some risk factors. This resource gives several informative facts which are useful when discussing the question.