British Heart Foundation

The British Heart Foundation is a United Kingdom cardiovascular research charity founded in 1961 by a group of medical professionals concerned about the country's rising rate of deaths from heart and circulatory disease. It funds medical research into the causes, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cardiovascular conditions, supporting more than a thousand research projects across eight Centres of Research Excellence at major British universities, and spends roughly one hundred million pounds a year on this work. The charity states that the annual number of deaths from heart and circulatory disease in the United Kingdom has fallen by around half since its founding, a decline it attributes in part to the research and public health advocacy it has funded over more than six decades. Beyond research funding, it operates the country's largest charity shop network, with about six hundred forty locations generating roughly thirty million pounds a year to support its mission.