GAINESVILLE - Medical staff at the Northeast Georgia Medical Center's Gainesville campus learned about a small heart pump used at the hospital at a mobile learning center Friday.
The Impella heart pump boasts it's the smallest pump in the world. Dr. Jeff Marshall, an interventional cardiologist and director of the Cardiac Catheterization Lab at the hospital said patients that suffer from heart attacks, heart failure, with weak hearts or after a complicated angioplasty would be candidates for the small pump, which is designed to take the stress of pumping off the heart.
"In patients that have low blood pressure, or what we would call shock, especially if it came from a heart attack, the heart doesn't pump as it should. So what we can do is take this small pump, and it's placed actually in the pumping chamber of the heart," Dr. Marshall explained . "It sucks blood out of the pumping chamber and pumps it out to the body."
"There are other, bigger devices we have to put in through the legs and through different ways that can also help the heart pump, but this one is one of the smallest and easiest to get in," said Dr. Marshall.
"If the pump is too big, it's hard to get it in to the patient, because our arteries are only so small."
The Impella pump is inserted through a catheter, then snaked up to the heart pumping chamber in the heart.
Jesse Turk, a senior flight paramedic with Air Life Georgia 2 in Gainesville was also at the mobile learning center, along with some of his coworkers. "Hands-on learning is really important. Right now, all of our crew members with Air Life Georgia are going through this online training," Turk said.
"We've taken the computer training about how the Impella works and the benefits of it, and today we're learning about scenarios when we might be transporting [patients that need] this and how the device itself works."
NGMC is able to insert left valve pumps currently and is working to acquire right valve pumps.
