A CONSULTANT physician from Bournemouth has developed a life-saving piece of equipment that detects the onset of a heart attack.

Dr Michael Vassallo of the Royal Bournemouth Hospital has invented a heart attack detector, which alerts patients of a heart problem, enabling them to get vital clot-busting drugs quickly.

And Dr Vassallo has been awarded with the BUPA Medical Futures Best Innovation to Improve Patient Care award.

He said: "I am delighted to win this award and extremely excited to take this innovation to its development stages.

"I really hope that the finished product will impact significantly on heart attack death rates.

"The immediacy of the detector's notification of a possible heart problem is the key to this concept.

"It would mean patients can go to hospital or call an ambulance without delay to get vital clot-busting drugs.

"These drugs dissolve the potentially life-threatening clot that causes the heart attack and unblock the artery."

The portable hand-held detector will hold an image of the patient's healthy electrocardiogram (ECG) which traces the heart's function in its memory.

When the patient experiences chest pain they apply the detector to their chest and their ECG is re-traced.

The device then compares the ECG reading to the one it holds in its memory, and if there are changes to the original ECG pattern which require medical attention an in-built alarm and LED display alerts the patient.

Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen, BUPA group medial director and Medical Futures Awards judge said: "All the judges were extremely enthusiastic about Dr Vassallo's entry and were really struck by its potential to significantly reduce the number of deaths by one of our country's biggest killers."

Dr Vassallo developed the heart attack detector alongside colleagues Savvas Constantinidis, a specialist registrar in cardiology and Mr Joseph Vassallo an electrical engineer.