CHI team bolstered with fulltime Interventional Cardiologist

Nov 08, 2009 News

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By Sharmain Cornette
The ability to offer an immediate response to cardiac emergencies around the clock will now be possible at the Caribbean Heart Institute (CHI) with the recruitment of a fulltime Interventional Cardiologist.
Dr Pratik Soni, according to Chief Executive Officer of CHI, Dr Gary Stephens, is fully qualified in his field and has been practicing cardiology over the past 10 years. Previously CHI, through Government’s collaboration with the Chinese Government, was able to temporarily provide an Interventional Cardiologist to CHI.
However, Dr Soni, an Indian National who is recognised as a reputable Consultant Cardiologist, has opted to migrate here with his family at the request of Dr Stephens in the quest to improve the capabilities of the local heart institute.
His wife, a Paediatrician, will also offer her service to the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation. Dr Soni has been on the job at CHI for almost a week now. He has the remarkable status of undertaking more than 8,000 Coronary Angiographies and more than 2,500 Coronary Angioplasties, many of them with stent implantations.
He is versed in other interventional procedures, the likes of Carotid, Renal and Peripheral Angioplasties, Pacemaker implantations, biventricular pacing for heart failure, ICD implantations for the prevention of sudden cardiac death, balloon valve dilatations, endovascular repair of aortic abnormalities and various other specialised cardiac procedures.
He is also an expert in the field of echocardiography, colour Doppler, Tee Ambulatory ECG monitoring (Holter), Ambulatory BP monitoring and nuclear cardiology.
Dr Soni has to his credit the implantation of one of the first biventricular pacemaker and has been accorded the rare honour of performing and demonstrating the use of stents in calcified arteries in Brussels and Belgium. In addition to his many accomplishments, Dr Soni has designed, patented and copyrighted many products for interventional cardiology out of which some are in production and are being used all over the world.
In addition to Dr Soni’s expertise, CHI will also benefit from capabilities of Board Certified Internist, Dr Ghansham Singh. Dr Singh was a local practising doctor before he migrated some years ago to the United States and sought to upgrade himself. He is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Cornell University in the United States but has also decided to return here to render his service to CHI.
With the wealth of knowledge both doctors bring, Dr Stephens is confident that CHI has the ability to handle any case of acute heart attack. “If somebody has an acute heart attack and he or she comes in here he can do an emergency stenting. Really and truly we should not be shipping people overseas for thousands of dollars by medivac…,” Dr Stephens noted.
He pointed out that the Interventional Cardiologists and Dr Singh both represent a major and very essential investment towards improving the service offered at CHI.
He explained that patients traditionally have had to wait for certain operations, a situation which will now be a thing of the past. “We have had patients who have had angiograms and we have to wait three months before we could bring in somebody to stent them. But no longer! You can have your angiogram and stenting on the same day.”
In fact, if a patient has a heart attack and is able to reach to the hospital within 90 minutes or ‘the golden hour’ they could be saved, Dr Stephens said.
According to Dr Soni, if an individual has a chest pain in the night there is no way that that person can wait until morning for a doctor to open his clinic. He pointed out that persons can come right down to CHI to get an ECG and be scrutinised by Dr Singh who will then determine if the need for a cardiologist is required.
“If he sees that a cardiologist is needed he will call me and maybe in 20 minutes we could find out which artery is blocked and what is causing the heart attack and we open that like you open a blocked pipe…” Once the artery is opened, Dr Soni said that the heart damage which may have been 60 percent will be reduced to about to 15 percent, depending on how fast the patient is able to reach to the institute.
Interventional Cardiology has advanced to such a state, Dr Stephens disclosed, that there is very rarely the need for emergent cardiac surgery. He asserted that most cases of surgery are elective. Over the past few days Dr Stephens was able to conduct three valve operations all of which were successful.
One patient, he said, had two valves repaired, which was a first at CHI.
Dr Stephens, a New York-based Guyanese, offers his expertise as a Cardiac Surgeon in the United States but travels here on a three-monthly basis to perform cardiac operations. However, he is hopeful that surgeries could be done on a more frequent basis.
At the moment he said that one of the limiting factors is to have a permanent person to operate the heart lung machine.
“We have somebody training in the US right now. She actually worked with us this weekend. The guys are impressed with her, she is not completely there yet and even when she comes back on her own (around January) we will still bring in some support on the short term. I think that is the last piece of the puzzle that we need to be able to do, to do it on our own.”

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