911 is best call to make if heart attack strikes
Victims treated by paramedics obtain life-saving treatment faster than hospital walk-ins, data shows.
If you live in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange or San Diego county and think you are having a heart attack, call 911 rather than have a friend or family member drive you to the hospital. It could mean the difference between life and death.
That's the conclusion of a UCLA professor who reviewed data from counties around the nation -- including four in Southern California -- that have implemented a new approach to handling heart attack patients.
By outfitting ambulances with devices that allow paramedics to more quickly diagnose serious heart attacks and call ahead to hospitals equipped to perform a specialized procedure, the protocol has sharply reduced the time it takes for patients to receive life-saving treatment, officials said.
Currently, only about half of all heart attack victims arrive at hospitals by ambulance.
When patients walk into emergency rooms on their own, long waits can delay diagnosis and treatment, health officials say. In October, Christopher Jones, 33, collapsed and died after waiting more than three hours at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar complaining of severe chest pain. Jones never received an electrocardiogram.
"Had that patient called 911, he would have been identified by the paramedics" as having a heart attack, said Dr. Ivan C. Rokos, the emergency medicine physician and assistant clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA who reviewed data on the new approach.
"Fortunately for 911 [callers], paramedics take care of one patient at a time," Rokos said. "If you go into an emergency room, the triage nurse is overloaded."
Even 15 minutes of delay in treating a heart attack increases the risk of death, he noted, and causes more damage to the heart.
Ninety percent of heart attack patients who called 911 in Los Angeles County had necessary procedures performed within 90 minutes of arriving at the hospital -- the highest rate of the counties studied -- according to data Rokos will present Sunday to the American College of Cardiology in Chicago.
Before the county instituted the protocol in December 2006, fewer than 50% were treated within 90 minutes.
Other Southern California counties recorded similar improvements, with Orange and Ventura counties reporting that 85% of patients now receive treatment within 90 minutes and San Diego reporting a rate of 86%.
