BMJ  2008;336:1456 (28 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.a526

News

Number of patients receiving angioplasty is rising, heart attack audit shows

Lisa Hitchen

1 London

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

More than one in five patients in England and Wales who have acute myocardial infarction are receiving angioplasty as their first line of treatment (primary angioplasty), the latest figures from the myocardial ischaemia national audit project show.

But "effective communication" between referring hospitals, ambulance services, hospitals doing the angioplasty, and primary care is needed for further improvement to be made, its authors say.

The audit, now in its seventh year, measures how quickly hospitals and ambulance services have carried out primary angioplasty or thrombolytic treatment in patients who have had a heart attack.

A call in 2006 by Roger Boyle, the national clinical director for heart disease and stroke, to prioritise angioplasty has led to more trusts using it, particularly in some areas, such as London and Birmingham and the Black Country, the audit shows.

In England, the results for 2007-8 show that 54 hospitals carried out angioplasty instead of . . . [Full text of this article]


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