New heart monitors for Dorset County Hospital (From Dorset Echo)
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New heart monitors for Dorset County Hospital
10:24am Monday 11th February 2013 in News
Clinical stroke lead Dr Harald Pröschel and stroke nurse specialist Sara Leonard with the new cardiac monitors
STROKE patients can take heart from new monitors at Dorset County Hospital.
Funding from the South West Stroke Research Network has enabled the Dorchester hospital to buy two state-of-the-art cardiac monitors for its stroke unit.
The Network, which co-ordinates and supports studies into stroke, provided £5,500 for Dorset County Hospital to fund the new equipment.
The monitors are designed to be discretely worn by patients as they go about their daily lives and collects information about their heart rhythms, which can help prevent them suffering a stroke.
Clinical Stroke Lead Dr Harald Pröschel: “These devices will help improve the detection rate of atrial fibrillation (AF), which causes a fast and erratic heartbeat.
“With traditional monitors we can only monitor people for 24 to 48 hours at a time which doesn’t necessarily pick up the cardiac rhythms we are looking for.
“These new devices can monitor a patient for up to 32 days and you can program them to find very specific heart rhythms.
“AF can cause severe, disabling strokes and we hope, through detecting the irregular heart rhythms, that we can prevent these from happening.
“There is also the added benefit that it will allow us to enter eligible patients into clinical trials.”
