Acute treatment of heart attack

Many trials and megatrials (including the GUSTO, GISSI, ISIS, PAMI and TIMI trials) have provided impressive evidence that it is possible to reduce the chances of a patient dying from a heart attack and to limit the extent of any resulting invalidity. All these studies were carried out under strictly controlled conditions. In day-to-day practice, however, recovery rates in hospitals often fall short of what is attainable under ideal conditions.

Unintentional delays at the expense of the patient

In theory, the acute heart attack care trajectory should run perfectly smoothly and encounter no delays. But in practice, things are often quite different. For example, a heart attack patient needs to be moved urgently: the trip in the lift normally takes no more than two minutes, but someone is holding the lift doors open on another floor... Or a heart attack patient arrives at the emergency department at the same time as victims of a serious road accident, who are then given priority... Unintentional delays like these occur every day: they have nothing to do with the preferred treatment strategy, and even the best doctors have no control over them. Yet in all treatment strategies for heart attack every second counts: the sooner they can be applied, the better the outcome.

Patients benefit from better organisation

The treatment of acute myocardial infarction has been so thoroughly researched that it would be virtually impossible to introduce a better form of treatment with significantly improved results. However, there is still considerable room for improving the quality of care by improving the way it is organised. By organising care more effectively, Thromboclinics aims to deliver a demonstrably consistent improvement in quality.

The key to this improvement lies in providing comprehensive heart-attack treatment within a small-scale setting and with a focused approach. Following strict protocols and applying stringent quality controls, while at the same time focusing on the individual patient, we can eliminate ‘bad luck’ factors and other hindrances. This effectively enables us to replicate the sort of carefully controlled conditions under which clinical trials are normally performed. Better organisation of the total treatment trajectory results, in practice, in better treatment of the acute phase of a heart attack.

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