Heart Checks By Telephone

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31540, 30 November 1967, Page 20

Heart Checks By Telephone

(N.Z.PA.-Reuter — Copyright) VICTORIA, (British Colombia). Hospital doctors at Victoria are checking the progress of their Vancouver Island heart patients over the telephone and helping to save lives.

Every month, about 50 longdistance calls are received at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria from patients in places like Tofino, Comox, Chemainus, Ganges, Ladysmith and Duncan. The calls are connected to the hospital’s electro-diagnos-tic services laboratory and the doctors are instantly provided with details of the heart cases. In small, out-of-town hospitals, inexpensive sending equipment picks up the extremely fine electrical fields radiated from the patient’s heart These are amplified and speed over the telephone lines to an electro-cardiograph in the laboratory at Royal Jubilee hospital. The continuous, jagged line which the electrical impulses transmit on to the graph tell doctors what is wrong with the faraway heart Mr W. A. McGovern, head technician at the hospital, said that about 50 of the 500 electro-cardiograms recorded at the hospital each month were from out of town. He said that the hospital began helping to save lives by long-distance telephone in

July, 1965, and today was still the only hospital in Western Canada with such a service. The laboratory can take heart tracings from any hospital in the world which has a telephone service and the sending equipment It once transmitted heart sounds of one of its patients to a heart specialist in New York.