Animation-supported consent for urgent angiography and angioplasty: a service improvement initiative.

Objective: Patient understanding of angiography and angioplasty is often incomplete at the time of consent. Language barriers and time constraints are significant obstacles, particularly in the urgent setting. We introduced digital animations to support consent and assessed the effect on patient understanding.

Evaluation of ECG Imaging to Map Hemodynamically Stable and Unstable Ventricular Arrhythmias.

Background: ECG imaging (ECGI) has been used to guide treatment of ventricular ectopy and arrhythmias. However, the accuracy of ECGI in localizing the origin of arrhythmias during catheter ablation of ventricular tachycardia (VT) in structurally abnormal hearts remains to be fully validated.

Methods: During catheter ablation of VT, simultaneous mapping was performed using electroanatomical mapping (CARTO, Biosense-Webster) and ECGI (CardioInsight, Medtronic) in 18 patients.

Infective endocarditis due to : a rare association between genital infection and endocarditis of the tricuspid valve.

is an anaerobic gram-positive organism associated with genitourinary infections. Bacteraemia is rare, with only two cases reported in the literature. This case describes an 18-year-old type 1 diabetic, presenting with sepsis and haemoptysis, on a background of poor dental hygiene and recurrent hospital admissions.

Comparison of a high throughput day case atrial fibrillation ablation service in a local hospital with standard regional tertiary cardiac centre care.

Aims: We investigated safety and efficacy of a high throughput atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation service within a local non-cardiac centre compared with matched patients at the regional tertiary cardiac centre.

Methods And Results: Patients were consented in clinic and pre-assessed by clerical staff. Locally, other than physicians, staff had no experience of ablation and were trained with simulations.

Predictors of change in bodily pain in early rheumatoid arthritis: an inception cohort study.

Objective: To investigate possible predictors for lack of pain improvement after 1 year of treatment for early rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Methods: The Early Rheumatoid Arthritis Network (ERAN) database was used for analysis of baseline and 1-year pain data. The ERAN is a hospital-based inception cohort of 1,189 people.