NHS: Heart Valve Disease

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My noble friend is right and, certainly, as we move through our 10-year health plan, the opportunity to make every contact count is very important. I refer my noble friend to the advances that we have made in services available in community pharmacies, because measuring blood pressure is hugely important. Our pharmacies, I am glad to say, have delivered nearly 4.2 million blood pressure monitoring checks since October 2021. We have more than 7,500 pharmacies now available in our high streets delivering this service. That is the kind of thing that my noble friend is looking for.

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of King’s Health Partners. The Minister made reference to AI stethoscopes aiding in the diagnosis of patients with heart conditions. The evidence for this was established in a very large trial—the TRICORDER trial—involving some 1.5 million patients and more than 200 general practices in our country. What it demonstrated was, compared to the use of the ordinary standard of care, a doubling of the rate of diagnosis for heart failure and a tripling of the rate of diagnosis for heart arrhythmias. The problem was that, subsequent to the trial, the diagnostic rate did not increase, suggesting that it is necessary to invest in training and the establishment of new working pathways to ensure that innovation can be properly established in routine clinical practice. Is His Majesty’s Government funding such activity?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right to make the point that innovation research is one part of it, but it is actually its implementation that matters. However, the faster and more frequent detection of cardiovascular conditions is the key thing and training is certainly a part of that.