Treating the right patient at the right time: access to care in non-ST segment elevation acute coronary syndromes

Abstract

In 2004, the Canadian Cardiovascular Society formed an Access to Care Working Group with a mandate to use the best science and information available to establish reasonable triage categories and safe wait times for common cardiovascular services and procedures through a series of commentaries. The present commentary discusses the rationale for access benchmarks for urgent cardiac catheterization and revascularization, including hospital transfer in the setting of non-ST elevation acute coronary syndromes. The literature on standards of care, wait times, wait list management and clinical trials was reviewed. A survey of all cardiac catheterization directors in Canada was performed to develop an inventory of current practices in identifying and triaging patients. The Working Group recommended the following medically acceptable wait times for access to diagnostic catheterization and revascularization in patients presenting with acute coronary syndromes: for diagnostic catheterization and percutaneous coronary intervention, the target should be 24 h to 48 h for high-risk, three to five days for intermediate-risk and five to seven days for low-risk patients; for coronary artery bypass graft surgery, the target should be three to five days for high-risk, two to three weeks for intermediate-risk and six weeks for low-risk patients. All stakeholders must affirm the appropriateness of these standards and work continuously to achieve them. However, some questions remain around what are the best clinical risk markers to delineate the triage categories and the utility of clinical risk scores to assist clinicians in triaging patients for invasive therapies.