Gordon Brown had driven to Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital to bring home his dying mother.

Mrs Connie Brown was close to losing her fight against cancer, and had also suffered a series of strokes. But it was to be Gordon who was to end up battling for his life on that day in May after experiencing chest pains while wandering around the hospital.

The retired builder from Woodstock recalls: "I felt a twinge walking up and down the hospital corridors looking for my mother. After finding her, I went to get my car to collect her.

"When I reached the main entrance, I was sweating profusely. I knew there was something terribly wrong."

By the time he reached his mother and wife Ann, 64-year-old Mr Brown was clutching his chest in agony.

But after suffering a heart attack he was to have the kind of good fortune that his namesake in Downing Street has not always enjoyed over the past 12 months.

A consultant cardiologist, Dr Bernard Prendergast, happened to be walking past and immediately took charge of Mr Brown's treatment.

But most crucially for Mr Brown, he suffered his attack in one of the select hospitals leading the way in developing the most successful new treatment for heart attacks.

Like hundreds of heart attack patients before him, Mr Brown was fast-tracked into a cardiac catheter lab for treatment, bypassing the accident and emergency department.

There, Dr Prendergast, inserted then inflated a small balloon into his blocked coronary artery, leaving a rigid support, or stent, to effectively scaffold the artery and restore blood flow to normal.

The procedure, known as angioplasty, has been piloted at the John Radcliffe Hospital, where the introduction of a successful round-the-clock service is helping influence the Government's health strategy.

Thrombolysis, the injection of life-saving clot-busting drugs, is today still the most common treatment for heart attack patients.

But the results coming out of the JR, and ten other pilot hospitals in England, have confirmed that primary angioplasty provides much better outcomes for patients, provided that it can be delivered quickly.

A conference held last week at Oxford's Said Business School discussed how the treatment can be extended to the rest of England, a country that sees about 110,000 people suffer heart attacks a year.

For, crucially, ministers have come to accept it as a 'gold standard' treatment for heart attacks across England, saving at least 240 lives a year.

Yet, currently only about a quarter of heart attack patients benefit from this keyhole surgery, with Britain lagging far behind Europe and America.

A new report presented to the conference, published in the aftermath of a nationwide pilot study, concludes that it is quite feasible to offer 97 per cent of people in England angioplasty as an emergency treatment.

And it proposes new regional cardiac networks, with cardiac centres like Oxford's, where a team of seven cardiologists provide a 24-hour rota.

But the Oxford experience shows that it requires a major reorganisation to succeed, with speed of the essence.

In the case of Mr Brown, who had also suffered from prostate cancer, he was able to be treated within a few minutes, to avoid serious and lasting damage to his heart.

But to save significant numbers of lives means creating an all-hours, seven-days-a-week service, delivered by a multi-disciplinary team.

The JR pilot scheme has also involved a close collaboration with the local ambulance service. For the new PPCI (primary percutaneous coronary intervention) system gives a vital role to paramedics, who first assess people with suspected heart attacks.

They now employ an ECG (electrocardiogram) tracing to establish whether a patient is suitable for angioplasty and transmit the information by telemetry to the coronary care unit for confirmation.

It means heart attack patients bypass the emergency departments and are fast-tracked to the cardiac catheter lab for 'the balloon treatment'.

The clear message from speakers at the Oxford conference was to always call an ambulance, rather than jumping in the car and driving yourself to hospital.

The conference heard that it is essential to achieve "an emergency call to balloon" target time within 120 minutes, and a hospital door to balloon time within 23 minutes While angioplasty works out about £800 more expensive than the clot-busting drugs, it is viewed as being cost effective because not only does it reduce the risk of complications and further heart attacks, it cuts the length of stay in hospital and also helps prevent strokes.

In Oxford, angioplasty has, in fact, been offered to patients for more than three years, but until 14 months ago only in normal working hours from nine to five.

For a first-hand account of what the new treatment involves for a patient, I did not have to look far.

In fact, just a swivel of my chair allowed me to hear about the experience of my colleague, Chris Gray, who was among the early wave of patients to benefit.

He was referred to the JR by his GP immediately after experiencing chest pains.

"The angiograms took place in a large room that suggested premises for business rather than medicine," he recalled. "Pushed in a wheelchair, my first impression was that I had entered behind-the-scenes at a dry cleaners.

"Once lying on the table and the doctors began their prodding about, my attention switched from my surroundings to the screen to my left.

"When the angiogram was completed I was told angioplasty would follow.

"During this, 'stents,' narrow tubes with hardened outer walls, were inserted to hold open the arteries. One was in a particularly fiddly location, I later learned from the physician in charge during a reassuring post-procedural talk in a recovery suite, where I lay pinioned to the bed by a sandbag. This was necessary in order to ensure the sealing of the hole through which he catheter had been inserted."

But if Chris had lived in Swindon or Milton Keynes, for instance, this gold standard treatment would not have been available.

That all looks like being changed. And Oxford is to be given a major role in making angioplasty the nation's first line of defence for heart attack patients, as Dr Prendergast told me during a break at the Oxford conference.

He said: "The national report provides very welcome support for the project in Oxford. We now hope to extend this life-saving treatment to a larger number of patients and establish Oxford as a regional heart attack centre for a wider geographical area." A key element of this will be the opening of the new Oxford Heart Centre at the John Radcliffe next year, built next to the current cardiac facilities and adjacent to the emergency department and the new Children's Hospital.

Both adults and children with heart problems in the region will have access to the new £29.1m facilities, which are particularly aimed at the growing number of cardiac patients who can be treated without the need for heart surgery.

It will include two additional catheter labs, for diagnosing heart problems, and for monitoring patients undergoing cardiology treatment.

A recovery unit will also be provided (with a paediatric recovery area for child heart patients) and 50 single, en suite rooms.

But already 1,400 patients a year are undergoing the angioplasty procedure at the JR, including 200 emergency heart attack patients.

Dr Prendergast, one of seven cardiac consultants on the rota, said: "In the fifties and early sixties, bed rest and morphine were viewed as the best treatments for heart attacks.

"In the seventies, big improvements came with the arrival of the fibulator for people who suffered cardiac arrest. The next major change was thrombolysis, the use of clot-busting drugs, with Oxford leading the way in this research. We are now seeing the next major change."

As soon as the blockage is opened, most patients have a dramatic improvement in the chest pain.

"This really offers a significantly better chance of survival. Timely treatment reduces the amount of damage to the heart muscle, reducing the need for surgery for heart failure," he said Government 'heart tsar', Prof Roger Boyle, who addressed the Oxford conference, said: "As well as providing further evidence of the efficacy of angioplasty, this report shows that a primary angioplasty can be offered to heart attack patients in almost all parts of the country."

It could take three years before the 97 per cent target is achieved.

But there is now no good reason why the Prime Minister should not be reaching the same conclusion about heart attack treatment as Gordon Brown of Woodstock.