Heart procedure often late, study finds.Byline: Jeff Wright Jeff Wright can refer to:
What's 90 minutes? For heart-attack sufferers in need of an artery-clearing angioplasty, it's the maximum amount of time that should elapse e·lapse intr.v. e·lapsed, e·laps·ing, e·laps·es To slip by; pass: Weeks elapsed before we could start renovating. n. between entering the emergency room and getting the procedure, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. current medical guidelines. A new national study published today, however, found that hospitals on average require 95 minutes for patients admitted during regular business hours BUSINESS HOURS. The time of the day during which business is transacted. In respect to the time of presentment and demand of bills and notes, business hours generally range through the whole day down to the hours of rest in the evening, except when the paper is payable it a bank or by a , and an even longer 116 minutes - nearly two hours - for those admitted after hours Adv. 1. after hours - not during regular hours; "he often worked after hours" such as evenings and weekends. Sacred Heart Medical Center Sacred Heart Medical Center may refer to: In the United States:
"If one goes longer (than 90 minutes), we dig in and try to find out why," Berry said. "We are proactive in monitoring this. It's a very important indicator for us." Berry guessed that fewer than 50 cases each year exceed the 90-minute standard. In most instances, it's because of a question involving the patient's status - the need to clarify a lab test result, for example - rather than waiting on a doctor or other medical staff member. Balloon angioplasty balloon angioplasty: see under angioplasty. is considered the best treatment for heart attacks in most cases. Yet four out of 10 patients waited more than two hours for the operation, according to the study of 68,000 patients published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association is an international peer-reviewed general medical journal, published 48 times per year by the American Medical Association. JAMA is the most widely circulated medical journal in the world. . Delays raised the risk that patients would die by about 7 percent. Since two-thirds of heart attack patients show up at hospitals on nights and weekends, the national study suggests that hospitals find better ways to more quickly bring after-hours staff into cardiac catheterization Cardiac Catheterization Definition Cardiac catheterization (also called heart catheterization) is a diagnostic procedure which does a comprehensive examination of how the heart and its blood vessels function. labs, where the angioplasties are performed, said study co-author Dr. Harlan Krumholz of the Yale University Yale University, at New Haven, Conn.; coeducational. Chartered as a collegiate school for men in 1701 largely as a result of the efforts of James Pierpont, it opened at Killingworth (now Clinton) in 1702, moved (1707) to Saybrook (now Old Saybrook), and in 1716 was School of Medicine. ``We need to ensure there are systems in place to get patients the best care possible, no matter when they show up,'' he said. But at Sacred Heart Medical Center, only about 500 of the 5,000 patients who use either of two cath labs each year are admitted after hours, Berry said. The labs are staffed from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays in addition to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, she said. A patient may actually be more likely to get immediate attention after hours when there is less competition for the two labs, Berry said. "Sometimes patients have to be triaged based on what's available and how serious their condition. We have limited space and limited staff." About 4,000 of the lab cases at Sacred Heart The Sacred Heart is a religious devotion to Jesus' physical heart as the representation of the divine love for humanity This devotion is predominantly used in the Roman Catholic Church and also used in the Anglican Church. involve intervention while the other 1,000 are diagnostic. McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center in Springfield, which opened its cath lab in December, and the Oregon Cardiology Diagnostic Center in Eugene do diagnostic work only. Virtually all of the cath lab patients at McKenzie-Willamette are seen on an appointment basis, a spokeswoman said. Only about 10 patients have been seen after hours since the lab's opening, she said. Nationally, the delays in angioplasty treatment occurred at all kinds of hospitals - rural, urban, public and for-profit - across the country. In the study, only 26 percent of after-hours patients met the 90-minute guideline. During regular hours, 47 percent did. The best hospitals require on-call staff to live nearby and respond quickly to their pagers, Krumholz said. At Sacred Heart, for example, on-call staff must be at the hospital, in scrubs and ready to go within 30 minutes of being paged, Berry said. "We don't dictate where staff lives, but you have to be able to hit that 30-minute mark," she said. Some staff members choose to sleep in the hospital when on call to make sure they can meet the standard, Berry said. In another measurement of efficiency, Sacred Heart strives to open a nonsurgical coronary patient's artery within 120 minutes of the patient arriving at the hospital. Nationally, hospitals reach that goal 66 percent of the time, Berry said. Sacred Heart, she said, consistently beats that average - with 71 percent of patients in May and 80 percent in April, for example. The Associated Press contributed to this report. MORE INFORMATION On the Web: jama.ama-assn.org |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion