The National Heart Foundation is facing an angry backlash over a “heartless” advertising campaign that suggests people who don’t check their heart health don’t love their families enough.

The latest in a series of campaigns to encourage Australians to visit their GP for a heart check launched on Twitter and YouTube on Monday.

In one ad a mother tells her son: “Every time I said I loved you I was lying.”

In another of the ads, a young girl sitting on her mother’s hospital bed, tells her mum: “It’s not just your heart you didn’t care about. It’s all of ours and now we all have to live with the consequences.”