Sudden Cardiac Death in Young People

Amanda Hack Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) for securing this important debate and for speaking so passionately about the issue at hand. As a reminder, 12 young, fit, healthy young people a week die of an unknown heart condition. That means that by the time we get to Christmas, 20 young people will have lost their lives. By this time next year, it will be 600 people. All of those deaths could have been prevented.

I first became aware of the scale of this tragedy when I bumped into an old school friend for his 40th birthday. He was fundraising for the brilliant Cardiac Risk in the Young, or CRY. Unbeknown to me, he had lost his brother to a sudden cardiac arrest when we were just in our teens. The second time I came across CRY, it was much closer to home. My niece’s boyfriend sadly passed away in his sleep three years ago. He was fit and healthy, having gone on a run earlier that day. His mother Lesley and my niece Izzy have been steadfast in their campaigning for CRY ever since.

What is CRY all about? It does vital work in raising awareness, supporting bereaved families and, most importantly, screening young people. CRY offers electrocardiogram screenings to all young people between the ages of 14 and 35. To date, it has screened more than 340,000 young people since its formation 30 years ago. I was lucky enough to see one of its screening days first hand at Cambridge University sports centre, organised by Hilary Nicholls, who has already been mentioned this evening, in memory of her daughter Clarissa, who passed away aged just 20 while hiking in France.

CRY is calling for the National Screening Committee urgently to review and reconsider evidence supporting the roll-out of a national screening programme, and for a national screening strategy for the prevention of young sudden cardiac death. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that. When a similar programme was introduced in Italy in the 1980s, it saw a reduction in young people dying of 85%.

Over the past year, I have been speaking to national sporting bodies alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham and Penge (Liam Conlon) to identify which were already screening their players and how they do it, as well as meeting organisations that represent sports facilities. Just the other week, we heard the excellent news that cardiac screening is being introduced across the netball super league here in England as a requirement from next season, and every player will be screened before the season starts. I also understand that it will be working with CRY to provide screenings for clubs and players where there is nothing already in place. This comes after Kaitlin Lawrence collapsed while warming up for a netball match and hospital scans showed that she had an irregular heartbeat. Lawrence was asymptomatic, young, fit and an elite netball player, and her experience shows just how crucial it is to screen young people playing sport.

I should, however, make it clear that many people can still play sport after receiving a diagnosis. Wonderful tools are available, along with fantastic cardiologists across the country, to facilitate that. We need only observe how successful Christian Eriksen has been since his collapse on the pitch during an international game. This need not be a deterrent; it is information. It is simply not good enough to say that screening young people will put them off sport and should therefore not be widely carried out. Crucially, however, the necessary level of screening is not being undertaken, which means that we must ensure that we have access to defibs and understand how to carry out CPR, which is just as important.

My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham and Penge (Liam Conlon) and I met Arsenal’s team doctor, Zaf Iqbal, at the club’s training ground earlier this month. Zaf is passionate about cardiac health, and has been using his position at Arsenal—and at his previous clubs—to champion greater awareness of CPR and defibs among school-age children. I also want to draw attention to the incredible work that Brentford FC is doing with its Heart of West London campaign, opening up its ground to offer cardiac screening to the surrounding community; it carries out about 1,000 screenings a year. That kind of engagement is exactly what we need to get the message embedded in our communities of how important it is to be ready in the event of an emergency.

The fact is, however, that our defib network is nowhere near fit for purpose. I recently held a “defib dash” in my constituency, which effectively worked like a small-scale community audit of our defib network. The results were deeply concerning. Most of the constituents who took part had to dash for eight minutes or longer just to get to their nearest defib. Let me remind Members that every minute CPR or a defib is not used on someone suffering from a cardiac arrest, that person’s life expectancy falls by 10%.

[Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) did earlier. May I pursue the question asked earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell)? Defibrillators can be incredibly useful when they are rolled out to communities, for all the reasons given by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Amanda Hack). It is hard to find an area in my constituency without a defibrillator that has been fundraised for and installed by volunteers, but I must admit that I do not know how to use one. Following this debate, I will go away and make sure that I do know how to use one, but how can we roll out defibrillator training nationally to ensure that as many people as possible know how to use them in an emergency?

[Amanda Hack]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. Defibs talk to you; there is no need to be mystified by their use. They are clever bits of kit, and a 999 emergency responder will talk people through the process. I ask everyone please to go and be trained, because this is really important stuff.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Lady for making that point, and I thank the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) for his intervention. Throughout my constituency and indeed Northern Ireland, defibrillators have been supplied to every school and community centre. The communities in Ards, Ballynahinch and the Ards peninsula have defibrillators in their city and village centres. We have an organisation called Ards Peninsula First Responders, which provides speedy training every month for those who want to learn how to use a defibrillator. On our defibrillators in Newtownards and elsewhere is a small diagram—an ABC for how to use them. I have not had to do this, but I have been told by First Responders, “If you follow these three directions, you will be able to use a defibrillator as well as anyone else.” Does the hon. Lady have the same opinion?

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[Amanda Hack]

The key thing that we have been trying to do in my constituency—and I would encourage other Members to do the same—is to demystify defibrillators. There are some very easy tools online that can show people how to use them, and they are such clever bits of kit that no one should be afraid of looking into it.

[John Slinger]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the activities of charities such as the Our Jay Foundation in my Rugby constituency are critically important? Naomi Rees-Issitt created the Our Jay Foundation in memory of her son Jamie. Not only has it installed hundreds of defibrillators in Rugby and the surrounding area, including bleed control kits, but—to her point—it holds training sessions in the community given by qualified paramedics and nurses. I have attended one of them, and they are lifesavers just as much as the defibs that go into our communities. All of this helps to reduce the number of sudden cardiac deaths in young people.

[Amanda Hack]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I think the conversation on defibs has been a really interesting one, but that is obviously just part of the solution to cardiac risk in young people. The main point I was trying to make is that, until we can roll out an effective programme of screening, we need to make sure we have the CPR and defibs tools in our toolkit to make sure we can support a person if they are going into cardiac arrest.

Finally, CPR training and knowing where the nearest defib is are important parts of the solution, but when we are looking at cardiac risk in young people, it is about how we make sure that asymptomatic individuals are screened and made aware of information about how they may react if they have an undiagnosed cardiac condition.

I want to put on record my thanks to CRY, the British Heart Foundation, Resuscitation Council UK, Brentford FC, Arsenal FC, the East Midlands ambulance service, Kerrie from Vitalise Health and First Aid Training, and all the bodies that have supported me in my questions on health screening, as well as fantastic campaigners such as Hilary. The truth is that we could be doing far more to tackle sudden cardiac death in young people, so why are we not doing so? I would really love to hear from the Minister.