Martin O'Flaherty

TL;DR: Current National Health Service resource allocation policy in England appears to be contributing to a convergence in health outcomes between affluent and deprived areas, however, careful surveillance is needed to evaluate whether diminished allocations to more deprived areas in recent years and reduced NHS investment as a whole is impacting adversely on inequalities between groups.

TL;DR: Centralized secondary coding with the ICPC by non medical coders is reliable, and can be used for coding medical problems.

TL;DR: This issue of Heart, DeWilde and colleagues describe their review of UK trends in CHD secondary prevention therapies between 1994 and 2005 using DIN, a UK GP prescribing database, which was a large dataset covering 201 general practices “comparable to the UK norm”.

TL;DR: All salt reduction policies analysed resulted in a reduction of CHD deaths and were either cost-effective or even cost saving; further details concerning the feasibility of such policies in the context of a developing country are provided.

TL;DR: While coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality is falling in Argentina, modest falls in Colombia and substantial increases in Mexico highlight the need for the region to propose and implement population-wide prevention policies.