BASINGSTOKE is on the road to recovery for heart health and looks to be leaving its past record as a regional blackspot behind.

A major survey for the South East Public Health Observatory has indicated that fewer people are dying from heart disease in the borough and more are now able to obtain access to life-saving hospital treatments.

It shows more Basingstoke men are receiving hospital treatments for heart bypass and artery-widening angioplasty operations than most places in England.

The survey also appears to back up results from last year indicating improvements in the death rate from heart disease. The improvement in the death rate for men aged less than 65 is in the top band of the South East.

Basingstoke hospital consultant cardiologist Dr Andrew Bishop, who has been at the forefront of efforts to combat the effects of heart disease, said the significant amount of money put into bypass operations and angioplasty - together known as revascularisation - was beginning to pay off.

He said: "This has to be a good news story. You must always be very cautious with sets of statistics like these, but there have been substantial improvements in rates of revascularisation and I think it is mirrored in the death rates.

"Five years ago we were a blackspot, with low access to treatment and high mortality, and now we are not such an outlier in the figures. What the cause is of that is a case for debate."

Dr Bishop believes better management of care by GP surgeries, the wider use of certain drugs and quicker access to care were all responsible for the improvement. He said waiting times for bypass surgery have fallen to six months from a year.

Dr Bishop and his colleague Dr Carl Brookes have also started providing angioplasty at Basingstoke hospital and, since October, have saved 30 patients the journey to London. Dr Bishop said no patient now waits longer than nine months for angioplasty.

In 2000, Basingstoke was marked out by health authority experts as a regional heart disease blackspot, prompting the launch of The Gazette's Healthy Hearts Campaign, which successfully lobbied for extra money for revascularisation.

Although the latest figures indicate a change for the better, the results are still mixed. Basingstoke is shown in the middle band death rate for both sexes under the age of 65, with the rate for men being described as "significantly low" on a national comparison.

But the borough is still in the worst band for the death rate for women of all ages. The latter figure covers the years 1998-2000 and is described as being "significantly high" along with the figures for Eastleigh and Portsmouth.