WELLINGTON, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- A New Zealand hospital has become the first in the world to use a single blood test to diagnose heart attacks in minutes instead of hours.
Saving the health system millions of dollars and getting patients treated faster, the fast, high-precision bedside troponin blood test is being rolled out in New Zealand hospitals, Health Minister Andrew Little said on Wednesday.
"This research, led by emergency doctors at the Christchurch Hospital, is ground-breaking," Little said, adding "Using a new high-precision bedside blood-test, doctors can tell within eight minutes whether a person turning up in the emergency department with chest pain is having a heart attack.
"Clearly, this is good for patients, those who can go home instead of spending hours in hospital worrying they are having heart attacks, and those who actually are having heart attacks and get the treatment they need sooner," Little said.
It's also good for the health system because sending people home within an hour of arrival takes the pressure off the hospital and frees an emergency department bed up for someone else, he said.
The research team, led by Martin Than, has been working for a decade on finding better ways of diagnosing heart attacks. Their methods won a prestigious global healthcare award in 2020.
Their methods have reduced the median stay of cardiac patients in emergency departments by three hours and saved the health system an estimated 50 million to 70 million NZ dollars, Than said.
The project was awarded 1.15 million NZ dollars from the New Zealand government's Health Research Council in 2019, but work was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Little said.
From February, 10 more New Zealand hospitals will start using it too. (1 New Zealand dollar equals 0.62 U.S. dollars) ■