Lusíadas Hospital Launches New Cardiology Center
Lusíadas Hospital has just opened a new Cardiology Center, staffed by 48 doctors. According to Lusíadas Saúde, it is the largest and best private sector cardiology center in Portugal.
The center deals with cardiovascular diseases in a holistic way, integrating various specialties and “putting patients at the center.” The idea is to enable personalized, patient-focused medicine.
In practice, this translates into a facility consisting of an outpatient center and a cardiovascular unit. The outpatient center has 18 doctor’s offices, including eight for consultations, tripling the hospital’s capacity in this area, explains Diogo Torres, the hospital’s cardiology coordinator. He adds that the outpatient center will not only offer cardiology consultations but also work with other specialties, such as cardiac surgery, endocrinology and psychology. Meanwhile, the cardiovascular unit has two rooms. One is dedicated to cardiology and the other will allow the hospital to start to work in areas such as interventional radiology.
The new approach to treatment also focuses on recovery, allowing patients to be discharged earlier. This is exemplified in the Cardio Lounge, which patients will enter and leave on foot, says Eduardo Infante de Oliveira, the Cardiology Center’s coordinator. He explains that this concept was developed in the Netherlands and implemented on a large scale in the United Kingdom and the United States. “The idea is that patients will lose the notion that they are in a hospital. Instead, they will be in an environment that resembles a hotel lounge. They will sit in an armchair instead of lying in a hospital bed and they will have access to television and magazines.” In practice, this is about humanizing care.
The new center evolved out of a unit that was created in 2007, with six doctor’s offices. However, it was too small to cope with the hospital’s growth and patients’ needs. The company has invested 3 million euros to recruit more medical staff and acquire advanced equipment for the various new rooms.
According to Vasco Antunes Pereira, Lusíadas Saúde’s CEO, the group’s services across the Greater Lisbon area will now benefit from the new center, which “has a set of capabilities that we did not have before.” At the same time, the center will help the company deal with pent-up demand following the pandemic and lockdowns.
Because of the pandemic and reduction in medical care, “people are now sicker and they need more specialized care,” he says. As a result, the new center is a “great opportunity and aligned with the needs of Portugal’s people and the national health system.” It will treat cardiovascular diseases, which Pereira says account for a third of deaths in the Portuguese population.
in Dinheiro Vivo