Media Release 19 Aug 2007

Sydney research into heart attacks makes headlines in European medical journal

Transmitting information about a heart attack patient’s condition using mobile phone technology has reduced cardiac mortality rates at the Royal North Shore Hospital from eight percent to two percent, a new study has found.

The research conducted by lead author Dr Greg Nelson, head of the RNSH’s Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory, has been published in the prestigious European Heart Journal this month.

The results show that when heart attack patients are cared for using the ETAMI (emergency triage acute myocardial infarction) model of care, more than 100 minutes of treatment time is saved – in turn reducing the size of the heart attack and likelihood of death.

“The first two hours are critical to a heart patient’s life or death - this early triage system is saving about five lives out of every hundred that were previously being lost,” Dr Nelson said.

“The results indicate the paradigm of treating heart attacks should change,” he said.

During the ETAMI Pilot Program, ambulance officers transmit a 12-lead diagnostic ECG (electrocardiogram) to the Accident and Emergency Department at Royal North Shore or Westmead Hospital, before leaving the patient’s home.

The ECG information helps determine what the best treatment option is, and therefore where the patient should be transported for care. The patients are sent directly to the operating theatre, bypassing the emergency department of a district hospital, to the Royal North shore or Westmead hospital, which are now regarded as Regional Heart Attack Centre hospitals.

“The early triage approach has reduced the time to opening blocked arteries, despite victims often travelling further than their nearest hospital to be treated at North Shore or Westmead Hospital. The time to open an occluded artery is much less than any other reported studies undertaken around the world and is now the benchmark to which others aspire,” Dr Nelson said.

Critical to the success of the program was the instalment of high-tech Medtronic ECG machines into forty ambulances, which was made possible by the North Shore Heart Research Foundation.

The ETAMI pilot has been running at the Royal North Shore Hospital since 2004, and has been a collaborative effort between the Northern Sydney and Western Area Health Services and NSW Ambulance.

About 500 heart patients from across Sydney and regional NSW are treated each year at the Royal North Shore Hospital by its highly trained cardiac team. Of these 200 participated in the ETAMI Pilot Study.

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