The Bay Of Plenty District Health Board's Cardiac Services Team is celebrating performing its one-thousandth Percutaneous Coronary Intervention.

Along with being an important milestone, cardiologist Dr Jonathan Tisch says the achievement also shows that high quality healthcare is right here on Bay residents' doorstep.

Before April 2012, patients requiring a stent would have had to travel to Waikato Hospital for a procedure, meaning they would also be forced to pay travel and accommodation costs, explains Jonathan.

'That is no longer the case and we average around 240 PCIs from our unit at Tauranga Hospital each year.

'PCIs are where we open a heart artery via a tube through the skin rather than undertaking open heart surgery. It's minimally invasive which means the majority of these patients only require an overnight stay afterwards.”

The procedure involves cardiologists going in through the wrist and threading a thin tube up through a blood vessel into the heart. They then inject dye and take X-ray pictures to see where the narrowing of the artery is and then, if it's suitable, open that up with a little wire scaffold over a balloon.

'That opens the artery up and allows the blood through again.”

The unit began with one stent cardiologist, Dr Barry Kneale, who was joined by Dr KL Chow in July 2016. The cardiologists are supported by an expert nursing team, radiographers and technologists.

Jonathan says the unit's results were audited and the excellent success rates, and extremely low complication rates, bare comparison with any cardiology unit in the world. It completed its one-thousandth PCI on Thursday February26.

'One thousand procedures have been performed successfully, locally, nearer to people's homes, which is great news for the community we serve.”

The news comes on the back of the BOPDHB's new Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory taking its first patient on January 16. The Cath Lab forms part of the Cardiac Services Building 50 development at the hospital which also includes a new clinical physiology area.