Chest Pain Center with PCI & Resuscitation
If you have a heart attack or cardiac arrest, you’ll want to be cared for by the most highly trained team. In Leon County and the surrounding area, that’s us. As the area’s longest continuously Accredited Chest Pain Center with Primary PCI & Resuscitation, we provide the most advanced and timely care to patients who've had heart emergencies.
What is a Chest Pain Center with Primary PCI and Resuscitation?
Accredited Chest Pain Center with Primary PCI and Resuscitation is the American College of Cardiology (ACC)’s highest level of accreditation for chest pain centers.
The ACC awarded TMH with this designation after a rigorous onsite evaluation of our team’s abilities to evaluate, diagnose and treat patients experiencing a heart attack or cardiac arrest. The accreditation is also thanks to crucial collaboration between TMH and emergency medical services.
What is Primary PCI?
Our “Primary PCI” designation tells patients:
- We use a specialized treatment called percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) as the primary treatment for severe heart attacks.
- We have PCI available 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
- No matter when your heart attack occurs, you’ll receive rapid treatment in our state-of-the-art Cardiac Catheterization Lab (Cath Lab) to minimize damage to your heart muscle.
What is Resuscitation?
Our “Resuscitation” designation means we use a therapy called therapeutic hypothermia (or cooling) for eligible patients who’ve had a cardiac arrest. We are the only facility in the entire region to offer this advanced treatment to improve your outcome after a cardiac arrest.
When you go into cardiac arrest, your heart stops, also stopping blood and oxygen from flowing to your brain. Without oxygen, your brain cells begin to die. Cooling buys your brain time. By temporarily lowering your body temperature after cardiac arrest, we can help reduce inflammation and decrease swelling in your brain, in turn reducing the risk of brain damage.
Why It Matters
One in four heart attacks are severe enough to require PCI to open clogged arteries and restore blood flow to the heart. Meanwhile, more than 350,000 cardiac arrests happen outside of the hospital each year, 90 percent of which result in death.
Timing is everything when it comes to your heart. Knowing which hospital is best equipped to care for you if the unthinkable happens could quite possibly save your life.
