Set up in April 2009 this service serves to treat patients who are in the process of having a heart attack. Patient can be brought directly by ambulance from calling 999 to our cardiac catheter laboratory where they will undergo a procedure known as angioplasty or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), which will involve passing catheters to the heart and injecting dye into the heart arteries to see where the blockages is causing the heart attack.
This blockage can then be immediately treated with balloons and stents to hold open the artery.
This is done as an emergency procedure as the sooner the blockage is opened, the soon the heart can received proper blood flow which will limit the amount of heart muscle damaged, giving the patient a better chance of recovery and a much improved quality of life.