"Looking at the data from the chest pain center data reporting platform, there’s a continuous increase in the number of accredited chest pain centers across national and county-level hospitals. As of now, the number of nationally accredited chest pain centers has reached 2,808, with 1,719 of those at the county hospital level," Huo Yong, director of the National Health Commission’s Coronary Heart Disease Intervention Technology Quality Control Center, recently stated in an interview. Over recent years, the accelerated transition of county-level hospitals from basic to standard versions has significantly strengthened medical institutions in aspects such as personnel qualifications, hardware equipment, technical capabilities, disciplinary construction, and regional collaborative treatment influence.
Statistics show that in the past five years, the number of acute high-risk chest pain patients treated at county-level hospitals in China has been increasing year by year. In 2023, the number of patients diagnosed with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) reached 200,000, with a cumulative total of 770,000 STEMI patients treated. In the same year, the number of patients with non-ST-segment elevation acute coronary syndromes (NST-ACS) reached 400,000, with a cumulative total of 1.32 million. Additionally, nearly 60,000 patients with aortic dissection and over 30,000 with pulmonary embolism were treated in total.
Especially since 2019, with the continuous deepening of the construction of chest pain centers, the reperfusion rate for STEMI patients and the D2W time (the time from patient's hospital arrival to the guidewire's passage) in county-level hospitals have continuously improved. In the past two years, these indicators for county-level hospitals have even surpassed those of higher-level hospitals, showing a promising trend.
"However, there are still significant gaps in areas such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) system hospitals. The proportion of chest pain center development in TCM hospitals nationwide is only 19%, with 221 hospitals passing the accreditation, which is just a 24% pass rate (according to the China Health and Wellness Statistical Yearbook 2022, with a total of 4,630 TCM hospitals in 2021)," Huo Yong pointed out. Some TCM hospitals urgently need to improve their techniques in interventional treatments and thrombolysis. Out of the accredited chest pain centers, 2,057 have the capacity for emergency PCI treatments, accounting for 73%; among these, only 110 TCM hospitals are equipped for emergency PCI treatments, making up 49%. It’s clear that the development of chest pain centers in TCM hospitals is still predominantly at the basic level.
Huo Yong believes that the construction of chest pain center systems should continue to promote the enhancement of specialized capabilities in county-level hospitals, TCM hospitals, and private hospitals. The main strategies include improving emergency response capabilities for critical conditions by reshaping processes, enhancing coronary intervention treatment capabilities through training systems, improving single-disease quality control capabilities with quality control systems, and promoting coordination between different levels of units through a collaborative concept.
