Heart failure can creep up on people.

“I never thought there was anything particularly wrong with me,” is how one patient, a man in his sixties, explained to me what it felt like before he was diagnosed. Like many people, his early symptoms – feeling sluggish, getting breathless – were non-specific. A regular runner, heart problems seemed unlikely.

“It reached the point where I was struggling to walk 100 yards,” he said. Even so, the diagnosis of heart failure came as a shock. It hadn’t even been on his radar.

Heart failure is serious. It means the muscle has weakened and isn’t pumping blood round the body properly. There are several possible causes but some of the main ones are coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and damage from a previous heart attack.

It’s highly prevalent in Scotland, affecting around one per cent of the population at any one time. Yet heart failure has a markedly lower profile than some other serious conditions, a situation doctors find frustrating.

The good news is that, while it can’t be cured, a heart failure diagnosis comes with a shining silver lining: new treatments that can transform patients’ lives. Thanks to advances in medications over the past 30 years and the efforts of heart failure doctors and specialist nurses, many people can live a full life for years to come.

The bad news is that many people are waiting much longer than they should for diagnostic scans, waits which campaigners warn can have significant consequences.

So how to deal with these delays in an NHS system beset by them?

Some doctors want to see heart failure treated with greater urgency, like cancer, and say waiting times targets would help.

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