West Islip, NY – Good Samaritan Hospital was recently approved by New York State, and chosen as one of seven community hospitals in the state without on-site cardiac surgery and one of two in Suffolk County, to offer primary angioplasty on an elective basis; giving patients who are not in immediate medical need of this procedure to schedule it at a further date.

Primary angioplasty is a technique for unblocking arteries carrying blood to the heart muscle. A small balloon at the tip of a catheter tube is inserted via an artery in the groin or arm and guided to the blocked heart artery. It is then inflated and removed, leaving in place a 'stent'; a rigid support that squashes the fatty deposit blocking the artery, allowing blood to flow more easily.

In 2001, Good Samaritan was chosen by the New York State Department of Health to be one of the few hospitals in the community to perform primary angioplasty. Primary angioplasty is the emergent placement of stents into freshly blocked coronary arteries of patients who have an acute myocardial infarction; or a “heart attack”.

Since 2001, the hospital’s cardiologists have performed more than 6,000 cardiac catheterization procedures and about 550 coronary angioplasties on heart attack patients. “Good Samaritan exemplifies the concept that experience matters,” stated Larry Altschul, M.D., Chairman of the Division of Cardiology. “Good Samaritan is now ranked among the highest in volume at a community hospital, and more important consistently ranks among the lowest in mortality rates for primary angioplasty in New York State. This extraordinary level of excellence is in no doubt due to the highly trained staff of the Division of Cardiology. We are all very excited about the impending expansion into the area of elective angioplasty and look forward to providing full service interventional cardiology within our community.”

For more information on Good Samaritan and its Cardiology Services, please call (631) 376-4444.

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Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center is a 537-bed (including 100 nursing home beds), voluntary, not-for-profit hospital located in West Islip. The Medical Center, which has 4,000 employees and more than 700 physicians on staff, had 29,000 patient admissions and more than 85,800 emergency room visits in 2006. Good Samaritan is a member of Catholic Health Services of Long Island. Visit our website at www.good-samaritan-hospital.org.

Good Samaritan provides approximately $20 million in community service and charity care each year. The Medical Center supplies residents with the tools necessary to maintain good health. This includes community lectures, screenings, health fairs and other community programs and services.