Chest pains…Ring an Ambulance!

There have been a couple of walk-in presentations to our nurses unit recently of patients who have had new or ‘significantly different to their normal’ chest pains. Which have turned out to be heart related and potentially life-threatening. We want to remind people to always take such symptoms seriously and to err on the side of caution; the first call is to ring the ambulance, not the medical centre. The best place to be is in a hospital, eg. Urgent care at SGH, not in the nurses unit at FMC. Hopefully we can prevent some of the delay in diagnosis and treatment which is otherwise always going to occur if ringing FMC or presenting to our nurses unit are the first options.