Today is World Heart Day. According to the World Heart Federation, 18.6 million people die from cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) every year. In the UAE, 40 per cent of all deaths are due to heart disease, and nearly 50 per cent of heart patients in the country are under the age of 50. It’s a scary scenario.
How can we bring these numbers down?
Preventive care is the best weapon to fight the rise in CVDs. While advances in treating CVDs play a pivotal role in helping heart patients control and manage their health, it is essentially a reactive approach, a reality in medical care that is inevitable but in urgent need of a review.
Prevention is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But statistics reveal how far we have drifted from that essential goal. The challenge for healthcare entities, governments and health-monitoring bodies is to wean people away from damaging lifestyles through awareness and education to create a synergy of positive outcomes.
Helping patients eliminate, control or minimise factors that put them at risk for heart diseases such as smoking, high blood pressure, cholesterol, obesity, stress and lifestyle must remain healthcare’s core pursuit.
Healthcare entities and cardiac care professionals must stay alert to the wealth of heart health information coming through new findings, research, the latest interventional methodologies, and emerging evidence-based treatments. Simultaneously, they must return to the basics and seek complete knowledge about a patient’s heart philosophy.
Medicine and healthcare have for too long focused on the heart’s illnesses; we now need to understand once again why it falls ill.
The heart is the body’s strongest muscle and the most emotionally fraught and vulnerable entity inside a human, and grasping both sides of this coin is the open secret to winning the war on cardiac diseases.
PRIME Healthcare is ahead of the curve and takes an informed approach to heart health. It embeds preventive care at the heart of its multilayered, in-depth, empathic cardiac care programme. For example, it uses AI-powered predictive atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk scores to determine the risk level. It provides preventive heart health check-ups and preventive cardiac treatment.
As a leader in cardiac care, PRIME offers chronic care interventional cardiology, advanced cardiac diagnostic equipment, a world-class cath lab, dedicated coronary care unit, and a 24/7 cardiac team.
New heart and lung hospital
The healthcare provider is also building the PRIME Heart and Lung Hospital in Dubai Healthcare City Phase 2, a milestone tertiary care facility with three centres of excellence in heart, lung, and oncology.
The hospital’s Heart Care Center of Excellence will offer a range of non-invasive and invasive diagnostic and interventional procedures for coronary disease, valve disorders, structural heart disorders, and arrhythmias. It will also offer cardiac rehabilitation services in addition to electrophysiology, cardiac physiology, and complex cardiac interventions.
The PRIME Heart and Lung Hospital is one more iteration of the provider’s commitment to combine predictive methods with its world-class cardiac specialists’ advanced diagnosis, treatment, and procedures to understand the patient’s heart health subjectivity.
PRIME emphasises the latter because it is a timeless best practice, a holistic pursuit, and a healthcare entity’s ultimate responsibility. Patient subjectivity in heart health is not new; it’s as old as humankind. But it is back to claim its place after the pandemic highlighted the need to study our responses to heart health anew.
Patients’ feelings about their hearts and health are integral to the cardiac care journey. This subjectivity, or the experience of symptoms, is as critical to understanding and treating the patient as employing objective heart care markers such as BP, BMI, diet, stress, and cardiac events.
It is no exaggeration to say the symptoms caucus is largely viewed for its medical import, but the patient’s response to their condition in heart health is crucial to achieving the desired outcome. Their response determines the why, how and when of their understanding of heart health. It is critical data that opens doors to many positive results.
PRIME Hospital’s heart care philosophy is based on this understanding. Its Department of Cardiology and advanced Heart Care Centre study the medical facts about the patient’s heart condition and their psycho-emotional matrix. PRIME Hospital is committed to syncing patients’ heart health subjectivity with medical objectivity to deliver the most effective and compassionate care outcomes.
Blended approach
With this blended approach, the urgency to continually educate people on the correct response to potential heart problem symptoms such as chest pain, breathlessness, and discomfort can turn the tide on delayed cardiac interventions and unnecessary deaths.
PRIME’s state-of-the-art Heart Care Centre specialises in acute chest pains that are alarmingly high in the UAE. With comprehensive inpatient and outpatient services, complete diagnostic support, a world-class catheterization laboratory, intensive care unit and coronary care unit (CCU), the centre offers 24X7 cardiac monitoring, total patient care before and after angiography, pacemaker implantation and primary angioplasty.
Its best-in-class heart specialists conduct the 56-view echo test compared to the dated echo test module of 10 views.
The centre also offers advanced intervention cardiology techniques such as balloon angioplasty and stenting.
“Our dedicated Heart Care Centre and Department of Cardiology follow emerging cardiac care processes and compassionate inclusivity of the patient’s concerns and outlook,” says Dr Jamil Ahmed, Founder and Managing Director of PRIME Hospital and PRIME Healthcare Group.
“Our team of heart specialists, cardiologists, interventional cardiologists, heart surgeons and consultants lead top-class cardiac treatments and management, maintaining our status as one of the best hospitals in Dubai. We will further consolidate our status with the PRIME Heart and Lung Hospital.”
PRIME Heart Care Centre’s non-invasive cardiac care diagnostics services cover 24-hour blood pressure monitoring, coronary catheterization, EKG-ECG, external event recording, stent follow-up, 24-hour Holter monitoring, dobutamine stress echocardiography, Ex-ECG (TMT), congestive heart failure diagnosis and management, complete executive physicals, exercise stress test, cholesterol treatment, ankle-brachial index, and carotid and peripheral Doppler.
