Holy Family Hospital inaugurated Mumbai's first cath lab and operating theatre. With this addition Holy Family Hospital has joined an elite group of hospitals around the world in providing revolutionary cardiac care. It will be a breakthrough centre for the development of such new procedures, thus broadening the horizons of cardiac care in India.
The hybrid cath lab cum operating suite is a sterile catheterisation lab furnished with haemodynamic monitoring devices, upgraded audiovisual imaging technology and the highest quality surgical equipment. This enables percutaneous cardiac intervention procedures that require catheterisation to be performed alongside fully open surgery, thus reducing the margin of error, improving patient outcomes and increasing work flow efficiency.
Holy Family Heart Institute will become the only cardiac care centre in Western India capable of conducting clinical trials and research on new devices and techniques, effectively germinating hope for critical patients whose future looked bleak and options, limited. For example, several elderly patients in India require heart valve replacement but face high risk from open surgery and hence would not eligible for this procedure. But, in the hybrid room, more than 50 per cent of these patients can have the replacement done using cutting-edge catheter-based techniques.
Similarly, the hybrid room facilitates new percutaneous alternatives for aneurysm repair, valve replacements, shunt closure devices, stenting and aortic arch reconstruction, especially when the vessels are too small or tortuous to navigate percutaneously and chest access is needed. There will be increased endovascular treatment of conditions that had previously been managed with open surgery, conditions for which neither the existing catheter labs nor the operating theatre were an ideal environment.
Dr Brian Pinto - Holy Family Hospital said, "This hybrid cath lab cum operating theatre is at the forefront of cardiovascular care sphere. The cath lab enables real-time diagnosis, interventional procedures and open surgery, which will facilitate the use of minimally invasive interventions, where open surgery was previously considered the only option. This reduces cardiac patient's trauma and therefore also reduces recovery time to a great extent. Certain procedures that would otherwise require eight to 10 days hospitalization will now have patients on their feet within 48 hours. Above all, Holy Family Heart Institute has installed the hybrid cath lab operating suite to improve patient outcomes."
The improved efficiency, top-of-the-line imaging equipment, high definition monitors, zoom features, intuitive haemodynamic fluoroscopy and possibility of three-dimensional image construction also means good news for the patient because more accurate images can constructed with fewer X-ray shots. This will improve safety standards and reduce risk as patients will be exposed to lower does of radiation and lower volumes of contrast agent need to be injected. Even standard intervention procedures are much safer in a hybrid cath lab.