Evelyn Vargas was told in three separate settings that what she felt was anxiety. She did have anxiety. That was the clever part of it.
Cardiac rehabilitation is meant to be twelve weeks of supervised, graded exercise. For patients two hours from a centre, that has historically meant no rehabilitation at all.
Rehab in a machinery shed
The shared-care clinic puts a specialist on a scheduled video link into the local practice, with the practice nurse physically in the room and the monitoring data already on screen.
Three appointments reaching the same wrong conclusion is a system problem, not a clinical one.
Dr. Yusuf Marchetti, cardiology
Back to work
Risk factor work is unglamorous and continues indefinitely. It is also, by a wide margin, the part of the pathway with the most evidence behind it.
“Nobody was careless,” she says. “Nobody’s job was to look at the whole shape of it. Now something’s is.”
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