Framework's claim that GPs should devote more time to preventing coronary heart disease needs scrutiny

EDITOR—The national service framework for coronary heart disease states that “additional coronary heart disease prevention activities … will consume time, effort and resource. Primary care teams will have to give careful consideration to how resources used on lower value and lower priority activities might be redirected to the high priority, high value treatments identified.”1 The framework does not give any evidence justifying the claim that traditional services are low value or quantify the benefit of high value treatments.

I estimated the maximum benefit of activities aimed at reducing mortality by considering patients registered with a typical singlehanded general practitioner in northwest Lancashire because the area has the highest mortality from coronary …