IT IS with grim regularity that people in East Lancashire are told that they are among the most at risk in the country of suffering from heart disease.

How encouraging, then, are the disclosures today that deliver a twin-pronged effort to save the lives of victims -- in the front-line during the vital minutes when someone is having a heart attack and in hospital where sufferers are promised swifter and vastly improved cardiac services.

And immensely welcome is the announcement that the heart unit at Blackpool Victoria Hospital -- already a centre of excellence -- is to get a state-of-the-art centre that will double the number of heart operations there.

For one of the major problems health chiefs have at present in dealing with our region's high levels of heart disease is the strain that services are under at Blackpool Victoria.

This was highlighted only a few weeks ago after new fast-track clinics were set up in East Lancashire to provide much swifter diagnosis of people suspected of having heart disease -- when it was revealed that confirmed cases could spend more than a year waiting for further tests before even reaching the 18-month waiting list for surgery at Blackpool.

Now, with the prospect of 100 per cent increases in surgery and immensely improved services that are promised to be second to none, hundreds of East Lancashire victims may no longer be held in this dangerous and worrying backlog.

And coupled with this development is a remarkable self-help move in the Ribble Valley's outlying areas to bring life-saving treatment to suspected heart attack victims in the crucial minutes between them falling ill and being reached by paramedics.

Now, volunteers, known as 'first responders,' are being trained in life-saving resuscitation techniques and equipped with portable defibrillators to deliver vital aid.

Together, these efforts bring new and necessary impetus to the drive to defeat East Lancashire's big killer.