30/10/2026
The importance of an ECG - By Helen Hodges.
Every heartbeat starts with a tiny electrical signal. It travels through the heart muscle, tells it when to squeeze, and keeps blood moving around your body. Most of the time this happens quietly in the background, and we never give it a moment’s thought.
An ECG (electrocardiogram) is a simple test that lets us see that electrical activity. It is quick, painless and, for many people, a useful way to check in on their heart health before anything goes wrong.
Why this is personal for me
After I qualified as a nurse, I specialised in coronary care. I completed extended training and spent eight years on a Coronary Care Unit, caring for people with angina, heart rhythm problems and heart failure, and people who had recently had a heart attack.
It was demanding work, and it was a privilege. I saw people who came in frightened and critically ill, leave hospital to go home to their families. I also cared for people whose lives were limited by their condition; by chest pain, breathlessness and fatigue. Once active people who could no longer enjoy the activities they loved doing. And because, sadly, not everyone recovers from heart disease, I sat with patients and their families through their final hours. That is something you never forget. Those people and their stories have stayed with me.
I have also experienced the absolute devastation of suddenly losing a member of our own family, and nothing in my training or experience prepared me for it. A close relative died very unexpectedly from sudden cardiac death (SCD) in his twenties. He was a fit young man who went to bed one night, as normal, and didn’t wake up. Afterwards, there were no clear answers, only questions, and that made it harder to make sense of. Was there something underlying that could have been found? Could it have been treated? Could it have been prevented? Those “what ifs?” have never really gone away for us as a family.
I can’t change what happened. But it is a big part of why I believe heart screening should be easy to access, so that other families might get the chance to find something early.
Heart disease in the UK
The British Heart Foundation’s latest figures show how common heart and circulatory conditions are:
Over 8 million people in the UK are living with cardiovascular disease – roughly equal numbers of men and women.
More than half of us are expected to develop a cardiovascular condition at some point in our lives.
Twice as many people live with cardiovascular disease as with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease combined.
Cardiovascular disease causes around a quarter of all UK deaths – about 170,000 a year, or one every three minutes.
Around 47,000 people under 75 die from it each year.
At least 12 young people (under 35) die each week in the UK from a heart condition that had not been diagnosed.
Heart disease is not just a man’s problem
Many people still think of heart disease as something that mainly affects men. When women think about serious illness, breast cancer is often what comes to mind first. But the figures tell a different story:
More than 4 million women in the UK are living with cardiovascular disease.
Around 830,000 women in the UK are living with coronary heart disease.
Coronary heart disease kills twice as many women as breast cancer in the UK.
Worldwide, coronary heart disease is the single biggest killer of women.
Read the full blog here:
https://wemakewell.co.uk/the-importance-of-an-ecg/
Every heartbeat starts with a tiny electrical signal. It travels through the heart muscle, tells it when to squeeze, and keeps blood moving around your body. Most of the time this happens quietly in the background, and we never give it a moment's thought. An ECG (electrocardiogram) is a simple…
