Now, get an angioplasty done during office break

Pune: After the lunch-hour botox concept, hospitals in Pune are coming up with comfy lounges you can walk into during your office break to get angiography and angioplasty done.

Too busy to make time for your ailing heart? Not a problem. Now it can all be done during your lunch break, say cardiologists. Hospitals in Pune are coming up with special 'heart lounges' for patients to walk in during their lunch breaks and get procedures such as angiographies and angioplasties done.

The concept of the day-care lounge came up after many patients demanded procedures that consumed less time than usual and required no hospitalisation after angiographies and angioplasties.

The idea follows on the heels of the lunch-hour Botox treatment offered by healthcare services. The lounge where the angiography or angioplasty is done is called a radial lounge.

At the Ruby Hall Clinic, the design for the radial lounge is complete with facilities like wi-fi connectivity, flat screen TVs, recliners and a readers' corner.

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"Lately, patients have been demanding they be made to stay fewer days in hospital and that's why we have been using the technique of radial angioplasty more often. In this technique, we pass a tube through the hand that travels to the heart and detects the percentage of blockage; this is angiography," said Dr Shirish Hiremath, cardiologist and director, Ruby Hall Clinic. "If the blockage is too high, we can go in for angioplasty, or removal of blockage, at the same time."

Dr C N Makhale, in-charge of the Cardiac Cath Lab at Ruby Hall, said the advantage with this procedure was that it took lesser time.

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"Earlier we used to pass a tube through the thigh femur bone, where the puncture would be bigger and so the blood loss would be higher. The time taken for recovery would also be more," said Makhale. "In this case, the puncture is only 3-4 mm, and since the tube passes through no major nerve, chances of nicking a nerve are also lower. A patient can walk out of hospital in a couple of hours after the angioplasty."

55-year-old Trimbak Agarwal was admitted a few months ago to Ruby Hall Clinic and not only underwent a successful angioplasty but also got back to work the next day.

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"He was conscious and perfectly all right in a couple of hours. In fact, he returned to his routine work the next day. We were quite surprised, as earlier angioplasty was considered a dangerous operation where the heart was being tampered with, but here my father was walking and talking to us a few hours after he came out," said Kapil, Agarwal's son.

Ruby Hall Clinic is not the only one on to this. At Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital's upcoming specialty wing, too, a radial lounge is coming up for patients.

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"The concept is similar- come and rest for 30 minutes before the procedure, finish off with angioplasty in 30 minutes, and then rest for a couple of hours on recliner chairs before discharge," said Dr Shirish Sathe, head of cardiology department, Deenanath Mangeshkar hospital. "These patients don't really need any special care and can go back to work in a couple of hours if they want to."