OUR MISSION

Every hour, someone in Ireland suffers from a stroke. Every day, hundreds of people in Ireland are diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

Lives are often cut tragically short and many are left disabled. Each year almost 9,000 people die from heart disease and stroke, one of the country’s biggest killers.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and our vision is for a future where no hearts are broken by preventable heart disease and stroke. This is why the Irish Heart Foundation was founded in 1966. As the national stroke and heart charity, we work every day to save lives and heal hearts.

Our mission is to eliminate preventable death and disability from heart disease and stroke and to support and care for those living with these life-changing conditions.

We work to achieve our mission through:

• Campaigning and advocating
• Fostering, promoting and advancing the relief of cardiovascular disease through health promotion, education and prevention activities
• Building a nation of lifesavers through CPR training
• Providing patient support and training services
• Conducting, promoting and funding research related to the causes, prevention and cure of cardiovascular disease and into improvements in the management of cardiovascular disease and its complications; and to publish and disseminate the useful results of any such research

OUR VALUES

Fairness and Equity: We believe that equity of access to heart and stroke services for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care, is a basic human right.

Collaborative and Evidence Driven: We design our programmes in collaboration with the people who need them and their families, so that they are appropriate, relevant, and effective and base and evaluate our programmes on the best available evidence. We believe in partnership and collaboration with other organisations rather than going it alone and we try not to duplicate the work of others.

Transparency and Accountability: We are trustworthy and transparent in our work and accountable to the public and our many stakeholders. We always aim for excellence, maximum impact, cost effectiveness and the highest standards of corporate governance.

Compassionate and Courageous: We are compassionate in our work, and we are not afraid to stand up for people where public policy or vested interests are failing to protect or threaten people’s health. We are relentless in our support of people impacted by cardiovascular disease.

Empowering and Supportive: We support and enable people to live and lead healthy lives. We empower people to create healthy environments. We work with people to understand their needs and to develop information, tools, and training to support them to make sustainable changes in their lives.