Hospitals Pace up to Provide Quicker Heart Attack Treatment

Heart attack treatment in emergency rooms will soon be quicker as hospitals all across the country are taking part in an ambitious project so that deaths due to delay of treatment can be prevented.

As of now not more than one-third of heart attack patients get their blocked arteries reopened within 90 minutes of arrival, to meet scientific guidelines of saving lives. Even half-an hour holdup in the treatment can send the risk of dying high up to 42 per cent.

According to new data, every year about 200,000 people have heart attacks caused by blockages in crucial arteries supplying the heart with blood and around 10,000 patients die of these attacks.

“There’s a very, very large opportunity here to improve patient care,” said John Brush, a Norfolk, Va., heart specialist who helped the American College of Cardiology design the new project, which is to be launched today at an American Heart Association conference in Chicago.

The best way to treat a severe heart attack is by reopening clogged arteries by inflating a tiny balloon at the site of the blockage. If done within 90 minutes, balloon angioplasty, can cut a patient's risk of dying by 40%.

Jim Kern, 47, of Norfolk has survived two heart attacks. While the first one took around four hours for proper care, during the second attack (which came after the new rapid-care measures were adopted by the hospitals) doctors “were there within 15 minutes of the time I hit the door and were already starting to do the prep,” Kern said. “The attention and everything I was given was a difference of day and night.”

The project has been endorsed by most major medical groups and government agencies including the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the institute called it the biggest heart care initiative since paramedics were trained to do CPR in the early 1990s.