Letter to New Early Cardiac Care Centers

April 7, 1992

Dear Visitor,

Congratulations to you in your efforts to promote Early Cardiac Care in your community with an outreach program and a chest pain emergency room. Criticism may be given to you for your efforts and the work "gimmick" has also been brought up. One reporter recently interviewed us and wanted to know how the chest pain emergency room differed from the regular emergency rooms. My answer to her was that it was a commitment on the part of the hospital to do a better job with coronary care patients within its community...That it was no longer going to be passive and wait for crashing heart attack victims to hit their emergency room door but to have an aggressive outreach program letting the community know that heart attacks have beginnings in over 50% of the cases... and that these beginnings can be recognized and intercepted both by individuals experiencing the discomfort...as well as by early cardiac care givers who participate by bringing the patient to the hospital. In many cases such symptoms are minimal when the patient hits the front door. The chest pain emergency room is prepared as a special area to give attention to such early symptomatic patients with a "thank you for coming in" attitude. (user friendly)

Yes, the chest pain emergency room could well be controversial until the proper recognition is given to the hospital for a commitment in doing a better job for the heart attack patients within its community. Dr. Sylvan Weinberg on one of the recent ACCEL tapes quoted an ancient philosopher who stated "all that is necessary for evil to conquer (or that matter cardiac mortality to stay the same) is for good people to do very little." Heart disease and heart attack will continue to be the number one killer of the adult population unless we penetrate communities in an effort to get to the very heart of the problem. Smoothing and accentuating this interface in the chest pain emergency room is the hospital's attempt to do this. Putting the chest pain emergency room in this context makes sense. If you need support defending this position please give me a call.

Recently a number of hospitals have written to us concerning the sharing of ads, television spots, ideas, etc. To this extent we will attempt to get started. One of the first ideas is perhaps a clearing house for the television spot ads. Since most of these ads are about 60 seconds in duration, it may be that we can collect a significant number of them and have them copied to an hour video VCR tape and make them available to all. Experienced chest pain emergency centers could put their new ads on this combined video tape and identify the person to contact. If another hospitals liked the idea and wanted to use a specific ad, they could then contact directly the hospital that put the ad together and work out some mutual arrangement. In this way we could be sharing and networking. The advantage of this is that the individual hospital would not have to reinvent the wheel each time it needs to promote its efforts.

What are your ideas concerning this and would you be willing to share and send us a copy so that we can put it on to this one hour tape? The understanding would be that it would not be reproduced unless there was contact made with the hospital who developed the ad.

Along the same line, other considerations would be printed ads as well as ideas and architectural blueprints, protocols within the chest pain emergency room, local funding ideas, etc. If any of you have an interest in working with our Co-Project Directors - Jane Strong, R.N, B.A. or C. M. "Sam" Copeland, R.N., B.A. concerning sharing a newsletter. Please let us know some of your thoughts on these ideas. Keep in contact with us.

If you did not receive your official Chest Pain Emergency Room Certificate for display in your emergency room, please call 368-3200 and we will get one out to you.

Sincerely,

Raymond D. Bahr, M.D., F.A.C.P.
Medical Director
The Paul Dudley White Coronary Care System
Saint Agnes Hospital

900 Caton Avenue Baltimore, Maryland 21229-5299 (410) 368-6000 >>>>Insert Daughters of Charity text logo

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