Supporting the Gwent Cardiac Rehabilitation Trust Fund

Supporting the Gwent Cardiac Rehabilitation Trust Fund

Most of what we write about on MyHeartPartner is what recovery looks like day to day — the monitoring, the rehab exercises, the conversations nobody quite knows how to start. Every so often, though, it’s worth stepping back and pointing at the people actually building that recovery infrastructure on the ground. The Gwent Cardiac Rehabilitation Trust Fund is one of those.

It started in 1983 with a newly qualified nurse called Jill Evans, working on the Coronary Care Unit at Newport’s Royal Gwent Hospital. At the time, cardiac rehabilitation barely existed in the UK, and it didn’t exist in Wales at all — patients survived heart attacks and were sent home with little more than instructions to rest. Jill visited a pioneering multidisciplinary programme at St George’s Hospital in London, came back convinced Wales needed the same thing, and spent the next year raising the money to make it happen, with help from Gaynor Colbourne (then the unit clerk) and her husband Ron, who between them turned into remarkably effective fundraisers. The first consultant cardiologist to back the idea, Dr John Davies, referred patients to the programme when almost no one else would.

Forty-odd years on, our very own Dr Brian Begg is also a part of this, who brings a slightly different angle to the role. Alongside his work with the Trust, Brian is a physiology lab manager at Cardiff Metropolitan University, where he recently completed a PhD comparing high-intensity interval training against standard moderate-intensity exercise for people recovering from coronary artery disease. He’s part of the research team behind the “HIIT or MISS UK” trial, one of the larger UK studies looking at how cardiac rehab exercise programmes could be made more effective — work that’s been carried out in partnership with the Trust itself. It’s a useful reminder that this isn’t just a fundraising committee sitting apart from the clinical side of things; the people involved are often the same people pushing the actual science of cardiac rehab forward.

The Trust still funds the parts of cardiac rehab that don’t come out of NHS budgets — equipment, staff training, community exercise classes for patients once they finish their initial hospital-based programme. It’s based out of the Cardiac Rehabilitation Centre at St Woolos Hospital in Newport, and several of the current trustees are former patients who went through the rehab programme themselves after their own heart attacks, and came back to help fund it for the next person.

We’re linking to their JustGiving page below because we think this is exactly the kind of work worth backing directly. If you’ve been through cardiac rehab yourself, or you’re supporting someone who has, you’ll recognise what this money actually pays for.

Donate to the Gwent Cardiac Rehabilitation Trust Fund on JustGiving →

You can also read more about their history and current work at gwentcardiacrehab.org.uk.