HOLIDAY SAVED HEART MAN'S LIFE
SPANISH doctors saved a tourist's life after the NHS repeatedly failed to spot his deadly heart condition.

It took a mugging in Tenerife and a last-minute £36 travel insurance deal to get him the care he needed. The 52year old man had an angina attack after chasing two thieves who stole his partners’ handbag.

Doctors on the island quickly saw that two of his arteries were blocked. And they said he had probably had the problem for 13 YEARS.

He needed double heart bypass surgery and six weeks of hospital care. His travel insurers paid the£165,000 bill. He said yesterday: "It took the Spanish to sort me out. No one in the UK bothered and I want to know why." He had regular medical checks in the UK since suffering a heart attack in 1990.

But he says that on three trips to the Queen Margaret Hospital in Dunfermline last year, doctors didn't give him an angiogram - an X-ray of blood vessels to check for blockages.

He said: "All they did was put me on a treadmill. As I passed that test, they didn't think it was worth making any other checks." He did not get his angiogram until his May trip to Tenerife and the mugging he believes triggered his angina.

The Spanish doctors found that one of his arteries was totally blocked and another 90 per cent blocked. They ordered an urgent double bypass. Both cardiologists who saw him said he’d been a walking time bomb for 13 years since his heart attack.

He had to have the surgery at Tenerife's University Hospital because he was too ill to travel. Insurers paid for his treatment, put his wife up in a top hotel and flew him home in July. He had only bought his travel policy the day before leaving home. He said: "I can't thank the insurers enough. It's the best £36 I've ever spent. But I'm going to ask to see a cardiologist, to ask why I was never given an angiogram in Scotland." He hopes to return to work soon as a manager for a beer pipe cleaning firm.

Fife NHS Board said angiograms were usually only given if a patient failed the treadmill tests and had regular chest pain.