The Heart Center at Torresdale

When muscle in the walls of the heart is denied blood flow as a result of coronary artery disease, heart attack, or other common cardiovascular conditions, this essential tissue can sustain cell death and thus injury and weakening.  Heart failure is when this process significantly reduces the heart’s ability to pump blood.

This condition can cause disability from loss of physical strength and heart stability and, if serious, can bring risk for cardiac death.  Heart failure can cause fluid build-up in the body, especially around the heart (creating a counter pressure to the heart’s beating capacity), and a significant amount of hospitalization, especially if patients fail to receive proper care.  The good news is that patients and their healthcare providers can manage this condition and often prevent it from becoming worse.

Heart failure patients need stability and vigilance in their medical regimen. They must be under the care of a center that can see them regularly and promptly.

Frankford’s heart center provides the ongoing care and monitoring – and ready access to heart-failure specialists by phone and in person – that are essential for heart-failure patients.  Our center seeks to provide a model for ongoing heart-failure care and a safety net for patients suffering from this condition.

We establish a schedule and set of criteria for visits that is right each patient.  At these visits, our staff examines the patient physically, assesses fluid status, and conducts other testing as needed – all with a thorough familiarity with the patient’s condition and history.  Our staff can correct the patient’s fluid status as need, with oral, intravenous, or infusion diuretics.  We adjust patient care, to match each individual to the needed testing and care, including emotional counseling and cardiac rehabilitation.

Frankford Hospitals also offer The Club of Hearts, a support group for cardiac patients that meets on the third Thursday of each month. For more information on times and locations, please call 215-612-5360.

We maintain our heart failure patients in this regular system of care because the result is dramatically less hospitalization, and improved health and vitality.  Programs that fail to maintain such continuity risk having their heart failure patients fall into a pattern of worsening symptoms and emergency-room visits.  But with the right education (including for families), maintenance, watchfulness, and quick access
to the kind of top-level heart care that our center offers, these patients
can help themselves to improved quality of life and far less time in or at the hospital.