Shaw Heart and Vascular Center keeps patients in Roseburg

Nine months ago, 71-year-old Dave Stearns had a heart attack and wound up in surgery to have one of his arteries opened.

Had it been six months earlier, Stearns likely would have been transported to an out-of-area hospital for treatment. Instead, he was taken to Mercy Medical Center’s Shaw Heart and Vascular Center, which opened last January.

An artery in front of Stearns’ heart was blocked, causing him to have chest pain and difficulty breathing. Within an hour, he was being loaded into an ambulance and taken from his Oakland home to the hospital. Once he was wheeled into the emergency department, Stearns said he was bombarded by hospital staff.

“Dr. (Howard) Feldman, I remember him looking down on me and saying ‘I’ll go get a team ready right now,’” Stearns said. “And in 20 minutes they had a stent put in there.”

Feldman, the interventional cardiologist at the center, performed the artery-opening procedure and had Stearns out of the hospital the next day.

“I couldn’t be any better,” said Stearns, now 72. “In a few weeks I was back to normal. Three weeks later I was cutting firewood. Really, one week later I felt normal, but I wasn’t supposed to do anything.”

The short stay for Stearns aligns with the average length of stay for patients with myocardial infarctions — a type of heart attack — which was 2.3 days for the first year. In the last year the center has treated 58 heart attack patients, five of whom have died. Feldman revealed these facts and figures, along with dozens of others, at a one-year anniversary celebration of the center’s opening Wednesday afternoon.

On opening day, Jan. 2, 2007, Feldman treated someone who was having a “mammoth heart attack” and kept the patient from being taken to an out-of-area hospital. Oftentimes, when patients did need to be transported, hours would pass before a patient would receive stenting or other treatment, Feldman said. In the meantime, heart muscle was being lost.

“The longer the wait, the more heart muscle destroyed and (there is) a corresponding increase in the mortality rate,” Feldman said.

To prevent damage to the heart, the center has a goal of opening patients’ arteries within 90 minutes of reaching the hospital — referred to by staff as the door-to-ballon time. In the first year, the heart center was able to meet that goal 82 percent of the time, Feldman said.

In the first year, 289 patients were treated by the 19 staff members at the Shaw Heart and Vascular Center. The number of people treated exceeded first-year projections, but the staff members still have goals for how to improve services.

The center director, Connie Kinman, hopes to hire a second interventional cardiologist, which would help reduce Feldman’s workload. And last month, the center purchased a laser used for peripheral vascular disease procedures. The laser dissolves clots that restrict blood flow to extremities — a procedure that is quicker than the former method that used catheters with balloons and guide wires.

The advances in patient treatment over the past few decades have improved care and have decreased the mortality rate for heart attack patients, Feldman said. In the past, mortality rates were as high as 14 percent, now they are down to 1 to 2 percent, he said.

The availability of procedures is also something that has improved over the years. The heart center provides most procedures, with the exception of open-heart surgery, Kinman said. But in the past, heart treatment was not offered somewhere where surgery wasn’t also provided, Feldman said.

“Before, it would be unthinkable to do what I do every day without a surgeon standing behind me shaking his head,” he said.



• You can reach reporter Marissa Harshman at 957-4202 or by e-mail at mharshman@newsreview.info.