Part of the BOPDHB ' s Cardiac Services team : Cardiologist Dr Jonathan Tisch , Cardiac Technologist Karl Hunter , Clinical Nurse Manager Jason Money and Cardiac Cath Lab Nurse Jen Muir .
1000 heart procedures completed by world-class Bay of Plenty DHB unit
The Cardiac Services Team , based at Tauranga Hospital recently celebrated completing its one-thousandth procedure meaning care closer to home for Bay patients .
The milestone represented high quality care on their doorstep for Bay of Plenty residents says cardiologist Dr Jonathan Tisch .
" Before April 2012 , patients requiring a stent would have had to travel to Waikato Hospital for a procedure ; with all that potentially entailed , travel , accommodation , etc .," says Dr Tisch . " That is no longer the case and we average around 240 PCIs from our unit at Tauranga Hospital each year .
" PCIs are where we open a heart artery via a tube through the skin rather than undertaking open heart surgery . It ' s minimally invasive which means the majority of these patients only require an overnight stay afterwards .
" We go in through the wrist and a thin tube is threaded up through a blood vessel into the heart . We inject dye and take X-ray pictures to see where the narrowing of the artery is and then , if it ' s suitable , open that up with a little wire scaffold over a balloon . That opens the artery up and allows the blood through again ."
The unit began with one stent cardiologist , Dr Barry Kneale , who was joined by Dr KL Chow in July 2016 . The cardiologists are supported by an expert nursing team , radiographers and technologists .
Dr Tisch says the unit ' s results were audited and the excellent success rates , and extremely low complication rates , bore comparison with any cardiology unit in the world .
8