Cardiologist, Dr. Ragu Dendi, joins us to talk about heart attack and living with chronic heart conditions during the COVID-19 crisis. Heart attacks still happen during a pandemic; call 9-1-1 if you're having symptoms.

Our daily hosts, Dr. Steve Stites, Chief Medical Officer, and Dr. Dana Hawkinson, Medical Director, Infection Control and Prevention are also joined by a patient who recovered from COVID-19. He discusses his experience.

The Center for Advanced Heart Care is putting positive patient experiences first with the Sept. 24 launch of a new rapid recovery space.

The Cardiovascular Labs' Pre/Post Rapid Recovery Lounge, located on the heart center’s second floor, is a spacious, naturally lit room for patients recovering from heart procedures in our Cardiovascular Labs.

The lounge – one phase of several significant changes on the heart center’s second floor – was uniquely designed to ease recovery for those who undergo interventional cardiovascular procedures that do not require lying down for recovery. This process is faster than the traditional recovery of four to six hours and offers patients a more comfortable experience.

Patients in the recovery lounge are cared for by nurses and cardiovascular technicians. The typical recovery time for these patients is two hours or less. The area has nine rapid recovery bays, each equipped with a specially designed recliner for the patient, a side table and seating for loved ones. Staff have a workstation, monitoring technology and patient supplies.

The lounge is open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. weekdays. In the first year, up to 2,000 additional heart patients are expected to use the new space to recover from procedures.

“The Cardiovascular Labs' Pre/Post Rapid Recovery Lounge is ideal for the increasing volumes of heart patients who can recuperate and relax in reclining chairs,” says Clinical Operations Director Melinda Loy, RN.

“The setting directly contributes to a quicker and more comfortable recovery," she adds. "Heart patients and their loved ones will be very pleased with it.”

The recovery lounge also frees up beds in the unit for patients who need more in-depth recovery.

More changes on the way
In addition to the new recovery lounge, the second floor of the heart center later this year will add an eighth CV lab, a 1,200-square-feet hybrid cardiovascular procedural suite. The area will function as a multipurpose lab across four cardiovascular specialties as well as allow less invasive hybrid procedures such as transcatheter aortic valve replacement.

New women’s and men’s locker rooms also are under construction as well as two new conference rooms, one of which will house advanced teleconferencing equipment for cardiovascular teams to broadcast live procedural cases to other venues. The locker and conference rooms should be completed by the end of the year.

Jen Butler, RN, nurse manager, Cardiovascular Labs; and Tara Bealmear, RN, nurse manager, Cardiovascular Labs Pre/Post, supervise more than 125 staff. Both are excited the major renovations address their unit’s growth and the rapidly approaching advances in cardiovascular care.

“The patient is at the center of all our care and that is no different with this expansion,” Bealmear says. “We focused on the patient and their recovery from the start of the design.” Partial funding for the rapid recovery lounge came from The University of Kansas Health System Heart Funding Council, made up of grateful patients, community volunteers and individual donors.

Employees from Cardiovascular Nursing and Clinical Operations, Construction and Facilities, Operations, HITS, Program Planning, Perioperative Services, Biomedical Engineering and Fund Development collaborated to make the recovery lounge such an essential new feature for the heart center. Cardiovascular Interventional physicians Eric Hockstad, MD, and Peter Tadros, MD, helped establish a vision for the recovery space in 2016.

Larry Louk, Golfology Co-Chair, and Barbara MacArthur from the University of Kansas Health System appeared on the Fox4 Sunday show to talk about the Golfology tournament and the ways in which $500,000 raised by the tournament so far have supported cardiac rehabilitation patients and programs.  Follow this link to watch the interview: https://www.iqmediacorp.com/ClipPlayer/?ClipID=c2829c1a-608f-4575-ad0b-526a1aa736d1

Larry Louk and JoLinda Vega, Golfology fore Cardiology Founders