DeTar Hospital Navarro Accredited Chest Pain Center with PCI

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DeTar Hospital Navarro received full Cycle III accreditation with PCI from the Society of Chest Pain Centers’ Accreditation Review Committee on January 16, 2010. Accreditation expires January 15, 2013.

DeTar Hospital Navarro’s Chest Pain Center is a partnership between our emergency department physicians, cardiologists, critical care and nurses, cardiac catheterization staff and local EMS providers to help provide the timely, high-quality care to patients with Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS).

The Chest Pain Center focuses on the rapid identification and diagnosis of heart attacks, and accreditation means the hospital has undergone a rigorous process to evaluate how we treat patients with ACS. In meeting the standards set forth by the Society of Chest Pain Centers, we have received their stamp of approval.

The extensive evaluation of our ACS care process has helped us improve the amount of time elapsing between our patient’s arrival at the hospital and the definitive treatment and to increase the accuracy of treatment, which at DeTar Hospital Navarro is cardiac catheterization or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Our ultimate goal is to save heart muscle and, therefore, cardiac function.

“Achieving accreditation is another milestone for the DeTar Healthcare System’s cardiac and emergency medicine programs,” says Donna Oldmixon, RN, Director of Emergency Services for the DeTar Healthcare System. “With more than 600,000 deaths attributed to heart attacks each year, reducing mortality is a tremendous incentive.”

More than five million Americans visit hospitals each year with chest pain. The goal of the Society of Chest Pain Centers is to significantly reduce the mortality rate of these patients by teaching the public to recognize and react to the early symptoms of a possible heart attack, improve treatment times, and increase the accuracy and effectiveness of treatment.

The Chest Pain Center’s protocol driven and systematic approach to patient management allows physicians to reduce time to treatment during the critical early stages of a heart attack, when treatments are most effective, and to better monitor patients when it is not clear whether they are having a coronary event. Such observation helps ensure that a patient is neither sent home too early nor needlessly admitted.

With the rise of Chest Pain Centers came the need to establish standards designed to improve the consistency and quality of care provided to patients. The Society’s accreditation process insures centers meet or exceed quality-of-care measures in acute cardiac medicine.

The Chest Pain Center at DeTar Hospital Navarro has demonstrated its expertise and commitment to quality patient care by meeting or exceeding a wide set of stringent criteria and completing on-site evaluations by a review team from the Society of Chest Pain Centers. Key areas in which a Chest Pain Center must demonstrate expertise include:

• Integrating the emergency department with the local emergency medical system
• Assessing, diagnosing, and treating patients quickly
• Effectively treating patients with low risk for acute coronary syndrome and no assignable cause for their symptoms
• Continually seeking to improve processes and procedures
• Ensuring Chest Pain Center personnel competency and training
• Maintaining organizational structure and commitment
• Having a functional design that promotes optimal patient care
• Supporting community outreach programs that educate the public to promptly seek medical care if they display symptoms of a possible heart attack

DeTar Healthcare System offers you the peace of mind only quality healthcare delivered by experience professionals can provide. At DeTar, you’ll find three board-certified interventional cardiologists who offer cardiac catheterization lab coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the support of a cardiac surgeon with more than 15 years of experience.

For more information about the Society of Chest Pain Centers, visit www.scpcp.org.