Hearts set on new lab

DANIEL BATEMAN in principle by its new board.

Health service chief executive Clare Douglas told participants at the hospital’s annual Cardiac Symposium yesterday that capital funding for a new lab was being worked on , however the Far North Queensland Hospital Foundation had committed to raise $1.4 million for the unit.

Ms Douglas said cath lab activity had risen sharply from 1000 patients in 2013 to almost 1450 in 2017.

“We now see almost 5500 inpatients and over 7600 outpatients a year across the health service,” she said. “All this points to the reality we cannot deny.”

Cairns Hospital director of cardiology Dr Greg Starmer said his team had treated nearly 150 emergency patients in the cath lab last year. About half of those cases were treated after hours.

He said a new cath lab would fix the health service’s capacity problem, allowing patients to be seen more quickly by doctors.

“We have had a situation this year, where we have a (cath) lab that needs mainten- ance,” he said. “Sometimes we’re doing complicated procedures. It’s old. It has down time, and we had a moment when it was down, it was being fixed, and we had an emergency (patient) come in.

“We went back to the old system, which failed, and the patient had to go to Townsville for treatment.

“We don’t want that to happen. We want to have a good service for the people of Far North Queensland.”

The new lab would allow the health service to carry out electrophysiology studies for the first time. Electrophysiology, which involves the diagnosing and treatment of the electrical activities of the heart, is partially carried out at Cairns Private Hospital but not at any FNQ public facilities.

Dr Starmer said public patients currently needing the service are placed on a long waiting list and ultimately sent to Townsville.

“A new lab would allow us to have more nursing staff and an electrophysiologist,” he said. “It would mean we would be able to do more interventional cases as well.”