Code STEMI available for Heart Attack Victims
BRUSH, Colo. (June 17, 2009) -- East Morgan County Hospital has taken steps to make sure that heart attack patients of Brush and eastern Morgan County receive timely care in order to reach the best outcomes possible. East Morgan County Hospital has adopted a program called “Code STEMI” and has provided specialized training for medical personnel to follow specific protocols. The program and protocols all were developed using best practices identified through extensive research.
First and foremost, patients and their family members play a key role in getting timely care for heart attack patients. If you or a loved one has chest pains or other symptoms that you think might be a heart attack, call 911 immediately. It all starts with you.
With that call, a process begins. When a patient arrives at our emergency room, health care providers follow this process asking specific questions and taking certain action based on the answers to each question. One course of action is providing clot-busting agents in an attempt to restore that blood flow.
When the patient is found to have a block in blood flow to the heart – a STEMI – our physicians call for Med Evac, helicopter transport, to the CardioVascular Institute of North Colorado at North Colorado Medical Center (NCMC) in Greeley. Also an integral part of Code STEMI, the flight nurses know the standardized treatment plans, communication, transfer protocol and data that the physicians at NCMC will need and they prepare those en route.
The other call is to the cardiologist at NCMC to alert him or her that the patient is being transferred. If you have ever been involved in transferring from one hospital to another, you know the process can have its hiccups. With the Code STEMI program, the transfer is automatic with no paperwork hurdles, and the focus remains on the patient care.
At NCMC, caregivers are specially trained to provide treatments to restore the blood flow through what’s called percutaneous coronary intervention therapy, more commonly known as stents or balloon angioplasty. Open heart surgery is also an option at NCMC.
You should note two things here: First, while those types of interventions are not available in Morgan County, our goal remains to get you the best care available, and we believe using the Code STEMI system does that.
A second and very important item to note: Timely care is critical. Unless a blockage in the artery is eliminated quickly to restore blood flow, the patient is at great risk of death or debilitation. According to the American Heart Association, about 30 percent of STEMI patients do not receive any form of treatment to restore blood flow, whether it’s through medication or interventions. You may have heard the phrase “time is muscle.” The more time that elapses before a heart attack patient receives treatment, the more heart muscle is lost.
The Code STEMI process is standardized so that every time we call this code, we know – to a degree – what to expect. Removing the variables also removes wasted minutes and gets your loved one the care they need as quickly as possible.
About East Morgan County Hospital
East Morgan County Hospital in Brush, Colo. is licensed by the state of Colorado and certified by Medicare as a 25-bed critical-access hospital. Designated as a Level IV Trauma Center, East Morgan includes a newly remodeled 24-hour Emergency department with three trauma bays, one surgery suite, one recovery room, one endoscopy room, and one outpatient surgery suite.
