Thanks to your donations, the Cardio-Respiratory department at Leeds Teaching Hospitals has recently benefitted from over £90,000 worth of funding from Leeds Hospitals Charity.

This money has helped the department upgrade their heart monitor analysis systems. The team are responsible for providing Cardiac Services across all hospital sites and fit over 8,000 heart monitors each year.

Patients are fitted with a small heart monitor that records their electrical signals (ECG) to check for heart rhythm abnormalities such as atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rate) and palpitations. These monitors are then analysed using specialist software and reported by the clinical team.

In recent years, the guidelines for managing certain conditions like strokes have changed, meaning heart monitors sometimes need to be worn for 3 days rather than the previous guidance of 24 just hours.

The team had already purchased a large number of monitors to keep up with a rise in demand, which meant a greater pressure on the analysis software to get through this workload quickly.

Before Leeds Hospitals Charity funded these new analysis systems, the department were using out of date and inefficient equipment, meaning that many staff had to work overtime to examine patient reports, leading to delays.  

Previously, staff could only analyse a 24-hour period of data at a time, but thanks to this new technology the team can now analyse the data all at once.

Andrew Fitzpatrick, Cardiology Non-Invasive Team Manager said, “We’re so grateful to Leeds Hospitals Charity for investing in our service, these new ECG machines will allow staff to work much more efficiently and ultimately ensure the best possible patient care.”