AN East Lancashire nurse will be leading the fight against coronary heart disease in her home county.

But Sue Warburton will not be limiting her work just to the NHS — she is hoping to get every community behind her cause, by working with all kinds of local groups and agencies to beat the area’s biggest killer.

In the newly-created role of clinical programme commissioning manager, Sue, 47, will work with NHS East Lancashire, the trust responsible for community health across Burnley, Hyndburn, Pendle, Rossendale and the Ribble Valley.

She has been recruited as part of the trust’s Save a Million Years of Life (SMYL) campaign to increase everyone’s life expectancy by more than two years by the end of 2011.

One of the campaign’s main focus areas is coronary heart disease.

One of her first jobs is to work with GPs to identify patients most in need of heart check-ups and cholesterol-busting drugs, but she will also be working with voluntary groups to provide advice, check-ups and monitoring at informal sites like community centres.

And she hopes her nursing background — 26 years working in the NHS in East Lancashire — will help her along the way.

She has spent eight years as a cardiac rehabilitation manager, and set up the first cardiac rehabilitation unit in Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale, going out to see patients who had suffered a heart attack and teaching them how to resume a normal life.

She said: “As a nurse, I was rehabilitating people who had already suffered heart attacks.

"But they would often ask, ‘Why wasn’t I told this before?’ so I think the Save a Million Years of Life campaign is long overdue.

“With heart disease, so much can be done to prevent it beforehand, if people know what to do.

“Having spent many years on the frontline dealing with cardiac patients, I can see firsthand what they need to do to live a healthy, normal life.

“As a nurse, you’re governed by processes that are already in place.

"Working for the PCT, I can develop these processes, to make sure that they cater for the residents of East Lancashire.

“So my role is very much prevention rather than cure.

“It’s never been more important to make a difference to the levels of heart disease here — in the North West, it claims one life every 12 hours.”