$1.7M Dunedin Hospital Catheter Suite Refurbishing

A $1.7 million refurbishment has provided Dunedin Hospital’s Cardiology Catheter Suite with technology to enhance patient safety, and staff decision making.

The project involved removing the highly-specialised X-ray equipment and replacing it with a new suite of the latest X-ray technology.

Cardiology clinical director Belinda Green said the clinical team was delighted. "We are thrilled with the result. The integrated imaging suite enables us to work faster and more accurately, enhancing patient safety and getting the best results.”

The Cardiology Catheter Suite is where the cardiac team looks at patients' heart (coronary) arteries and evaluates narrowing in the arteries, assesses leaking or restricted valves, heart muscle function, and pressures inside the chambers of the heart.

The new suite has a fully integrated system that allows the narrowing to be evaluated by measuring flow changes across the restricted area, and also provides direct imaging of the artery.

Collecting data helps the team to determine whether the patient would be better off with a surgical bypass operation, or stents implanted across the narrowing.

Replacing a patient’s aortic valve with one inserted on a long tube is an important technique for those patients who would not do very well with the physical stresses associated with traditional open heart surgery.

The new suite has integrated CT that enables the team to see in greater detail exactly where the valve should be implanted and which access point should be used. This is done in the Cardiac Suite under imaging. The integrated CT image viewer helps the operator to navigate the leg and abdominal arteries, as well as aiding in decisions about the final positioning of the valve before it is implanted.

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