POOLE Hospital is leading the rest of Britain in bringing people back from the "dead".

Through a pioneering programme, up to 55 per cent of patients clinically dead as a result of massive heart attacks are being successfully resuscitated, returning home to resume near-normal lives.

Five years ago, the number of cardiac-arrest survivors was something like eight per cent at best.

Nationally, the survival rate is still very low. In the rest of Dorset, on average, no more than 15 per cent of cardiac arrest victims make a complete recovery.

The message is that if you must have a heart attack, then have it within the Poole Hospital catchment area.

Soon the senior resuscitation officer at Poole Hospital, David Halliwell, will be sharing his techniques with other regions.

During the past two years at Poole Hospital, Mr Halliwell, who was trained in the ambulance service, has developed a team of professionals who are daily pushing back the frontiers of frontline life-saving.

"Day or night, Monday morning or late on a Sunday, you'll have the same chance with whichever crash team is on duty," he said.

The crash team is a group of doctors, nurses and technicians who have no more than three or four minutes to kick-start the heart, often with high-voltage electric-shock treatment.

Much of his drive is now focused on preventing cardiac arrests in the hospital through the recently introduced Poole Early Warning System (PEWS).

High-risk patients whose conditions start to deteriorate are immediately given treatment to reduce the chance of a heart attack.

"Through PEWS I'd say we've reduced the workload of the crash teams by about five calls a week," said Mr Halliwell. "I don't want to upset other hospitals in Dorset, but I'd say our results are substantially different from most others in the country.

"I haven't got the complete statistics yet, but over a fair test period we successfully resuscitated 25 per cent of cardiac arrests."

He added: "But in recent weeks we've been running at 55 per cent and I'm confident we can improve on that."

The resuscitation team has just been voted the best department at Poole Hospital in the Meggitt plc awards.

Wimborne-based Meggitt is an international group specialising in aerospace, defence, electronics and control technologies.