Robert Ainsworth would have died from his heart attack if he had lived in East Anglia, Kent or Cheshire.

He was almost dead when he arrived at the London Chest Hospital. Doctors are convinced that if he had received the drug treatment given to four fifths of heart attack victims, he would not have pulled through.

Instead of administering medication in an attempt to dissolve the blood clot that was stopping the blood flow to the heart (thrombolysis), London Ambulance Service personnel are trained to use machinery to diagnose what is wrong and take patients to the nearest specialist centre - even if this means driving past an A&E department.

John McAllister, an emergency medical technician, and Becky Pannell and Dave Hyam, ambulance crew paramedics, arrived at Mr Ainsworth’s apartment in Bethnal Green, carried out an electrocardiogram to establish the pain was a heart attack, and took him to the London Chest Hospital.

Duncan Dymond, a consultant cardiologist, said when Mr Ainsworth arrived he had almost no blood pressure and his heart was only beating 10 times a minute instead of the normal 80.

Mr Dymond said: “He was blue and mottled. He was almost dead. This was probably the best save we have had. Without a doubt he would have died had he been given thrombolysis instead.”

Since becoming a 24-hour heart attack centre in April 2006, the team has carried out 1,110 emergency primary angioplasty procedures. The mortality rate has fallen from 12 per cent to 4.5 per cent in heart attack patients who have been treated at the unit, run by Barts Hospital and The London NHS Trust.