The Consultant Cardiologist honoured for services to heart failure
25 February 2025
This Heart Month Consultant Cardiologist Professor Zaheer Yousef reflects on a remarkable life and career, that will soon see him collect an OBE from the King.
Professor Zaheer Yousef grew up on a council estate in London after his family moved there from Africa. While at medical school he doubted whether he might get into the competitive field of cardiology. Now a Consultant Cardiologist at University Hospital of Wales with an impressive list of achievements to his name, Zaheer is preparing to go to Windsor Castle in March to receive an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to heart failure.
"I told my parents and my mum hasn't stopped crying since," he said about receiving the award in the King’s New Year’s Honours. "I was absolutely shocked. When you work in the health sector, you're surrounded by amazing people doing amazing things every day. I just put my head down and got on with my thing. And then all of a sudden you get an award like this and you think, why have I been singled out?”
His passion for cardiology began in the late 1980s during his medical training. The pace of medical discoveries was what first attracted him to the field.
“Cardiology was always a very dynamic speciality, but it was also an incredibly competitive speciality to get into. I never really knew whether I'd actually make it.
"When I was a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, one of the cardiologists presented a case of one of the first stents that were put in at Guy’s. I was in the lecture theatre listening to this thinking, ‘wow, this is incredible’.
“That moment sparked my interest in cardiology and heart failure. Over the years, the number of treatments has increased and increased, and patients are just surviving much longer but also feeling better as well.”
Soon after his training he was awarded a British Heart Foundation grant for a research fellowship at St Thomas' Hospital. Focused on the care of patients with heart attacks and heart failure, the research received international attention, became the basis of national guidelines and earned him a Doctorate in Medicine.
In 2004 following periods in Cardiff, and Birmingham, Zaheer was appointed Consultant Cardiologist at the University Hospital of Wales in 2004, to lead and develop the heart failure, cardiomyopathy, and complex pacing services for the region.
As a specialist in heart failure, Zaheer explains his role: "Heart failure means the heart is not producing the output that you'd like it to. Whenever I see a patient diagnosed with heart failure, the first question I always ask is why? Part of my job is to try and work out what the cause is.
“Once you've found the cause for it, then obviously treat the cause. If it's due to a valve problem, then you try and treat the valve, but then you have to do everything possible to improve heart health function. So that's where the tablets come in. Lots of lifestyle changes as well. So you know, healthy diets, eating properly, drinking less, cutting out alcohol if possible, exercising and all those sort of lifestyle things are really important as well.”
“We are blessed with a great team of heart failure nurses who do a brilliant job ensuring the treatments for our patients are optimised and that the patients, and their carers, receive the community support they need.
“Being a chronic condition, some of our patients do sadly reach the end-of-life phase of their illness. We have worked closely with the Supportive Care team led by Dr Clea Atkinson, to extend end-of-life care more effectively to heart failure patients. This has attracted widespread interest and national awards for Clea and her team.”
Another speciality is the fitting of pacemakers. Zaheer has played a key role in introducing pacemakers for heart failure not just in Wales but also in Sudan and Sierra Leone.
"I think I was probably in the right place at the right time,” he said. “Towards the end of my training, that’s when all the data for pacemakers and heart failure was coming out. There weren’t many people who were trained to implant them. I did a fellowship, learned how to put pacemakers in and brought it back to Wales. Over 20 years, we’ve fitted thousands of pacemakers and also trained many people."
One of Zaheer’s main motivators is the disparity in healthcare, both across the UK and worldwide.
“In the UK,” he says, “an 85-year-old with a bit of a heart blockage rightly gets a pacemaker without question. In low to middle income countries, younger patients with severe heart conditions have no access to this life-saving device."
In the UK it is mandatory to remove pacemakers before cremation. This leaves thousands of unused devices with years of battery life. Zaheer has established a programme collecting these pacemakers, sterilising and refitting them in patients living in countries that would otherwise not have access to the technology.
"I've been to Sudan many times and helped them set up their pacemaker service. We started with these repurposed pacemakers, trained local doctors and managed to get funding to get the service started. Before the recent problems in the country, they were implanting 300 pacemakers a year.
“And I went out to Sierra Leone, I trained a doctor who now regularly implants pacemakers. That’s actually very rewarding. With the small amount of effort, the benefits are just huge.”
Zaheer has also maintained a strong interest in research and innovation. He has recently helped raise >£5 million for a research and development project he is supervising, focused on a completely different way of pacing the heart.
"We’ve tested it in sheep and shown that you can actually improve the heart function by 20%. So the primary endpoint of the study that we're doing at the moment is to show the way we want to pace the heart is safe for patients. And then the secondary endpoint is to show that it is doing good. It would be a completely new treatment for potentially every patient with heart failure who's got a pacemaker. The potential improvement for patients is huge”.
When Professor Zaheer Yousef OBE asks ‘why have I been singled out’ for his services to heart failure, it isn’t a hard question to answer.