The Chest Pain Assessment Unit at Kettering General Hospital (KGH) relies on Radiometer’s compact AQT90 FLEX point-of-care (POC) analyser to provide a gold-standard, streamlined treatment pathway for patients presenting with chest pain.
Sarah Mounsey, a cardiac outreach nurse at KGH, explained: “Chest pain patients arriving at KGH are assessed by a cardiac outreach nurse and, if they fit certain criteria, will be accepted onto the triple test pathway. We assess the type of chest pain the patient has and how long they have been suffering from it, look at the ECG and consider any other risk factors that may exist, before deciding whether triple cardiac marker testing is appropriate.”
Faye Robson, also a cardiac outreach nurse at KGH, continued: “Historically, patients have been admitted to hospital and then had to wait 10 hours before having a troponin test to eliminate cardiac problems. Testing on the AQT90 FLEX allows us to perform the triple test on admission and again 90 minutes later, which means much less time is spent waiting for test results. We can turn patients around more quickly – those with negative results go home much sooner – and make more efficient use of our resources. It is a very, very positive experience for both the patient and the hospital.”
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