A NORTH EAST cardiologist retiring after a 30-year career has spoken of how he was set to operate on a photographer who died leading to one of The Northern Echo’s most important campaigns.
Simon Kendall, former cardiologist consultant at James Cook University Hospital, is retiring after a career spanning 30 years treating around 6,700 patients.
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One of those patients was then 38-year-old Ian Weir, a photographer at The Echo who died in 1999 awaiting a triple heart bypass.
Mr Wier had been waiting for seven months for an “urgent” triple bypass after suffering a heart attack the previous November.
While waiting at home, he wrote a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair, delivered by then Echo editor Peter Barron.
In the letter, Mr Weir called on the Mr Blair asking “for how much longer will I be alive?”
Mr Weir sadly died a day before he’d been due to see a heart surgeon for the first time, the heart surgeon being Mr Kendall.
Mr Kendall said: “It was heartbreaking and he was one example of one of the people we couldn’t get to quick enough.
“He was the same age as me, his children were the same age as mine, and his wife kept the appointment the day after and came to see me.”
The terrible reality at the time was underlined by research carried out by The Northern Echo, who launched a campaign after Ian Weir’s funeral called “A Chance To Live.”
Darlington MP Alan Milburn, who’d become Health Secretary and counted Ian as a friend, responded by launching the UK’s first National Framework for Coronary Care.
This resulted in heart bypass waiting times in Britain being cut to an average of three months.
Speaking on the campaign Mr Kendall said: “The Northern Echo made the difference in getting a huge amount of money put into cardiac care in the United Kingdom.
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“That was a major event in my career and The Northern Echo has been a positive force to make a big difference.”
Mr Kendall stressed that people “don’t realise how dire it was for Teesside” when it came to treating heart disease and said many on Teesside were “getting a bad deal.”
He said: “We had people with awful heart disease who just couldn’t get advanced treatment, if you were in London or Newcastle you had much more access to treatment and Teesside was getting a bad deal.
“So the unit we set up together and have worked to really try and get Teesside up to 21st century care really.
“If you told me 25 years that we’d have a robot in our theatres doing surgery, I would never ever believe you, it’s been incredible to be set up as a basic unit, but actually we have gone beyond that.
“We have a really good reputation in our nation for what Middlesbrough achieves in our Cardio unit.”
Although Simon Kendall is retiring as a cariologist consultant, he is not separating from the NHS entirely and is moving on to become a medical director for NHS England and NHS Improvement.
He added: “I’m naïve and optimistic enough that I might make a little difference, we’ve got some real inequalities in health care across the region that need addressing.
“GPs aren’t enjoying their job at the moment particularly and the public feel they don’t have access to GPs, so we have a primary care issue to sort out.
“We’ve got the waiting in A&E, we’ve got the elective surgery recovery, the mental health challenges, so I really hope I can contribute to that agenda.
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“So I’ve retired from heart surgery but I’ve still got an ambition to help.”
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