Raleigh General Hospital CEO Karen Bowling said she’d waited years to deliver the news she gave to the community Thursday.

RGH is now approved by the West Virginia Health Care Authority to provide emergency and elective cardiac angioplasty to patients.

The HCA issued a Certificate of Need approving RGH to perform the surgeries earlier this week, Bowling said.

“It’s very exciting for us,” she said. “We received so much support from the community.

“You’d be surprised at the number of people from the community who actually called me ... saying how wonderful it was that they were going to have these services.”

Many elected officials have shown support, too, she added.

Cardiac angioplasty is a potentially life-saving surgery that opens narrow or blocked vessels that supply blood to the heart. It can be used during a heart attack to quickly open a blocked artery and reduce the amount of damage to a patient’s heart.

It also may be used to reduce the symptoms of coronary artery disease.

During an angioplasty, the doctor will often place a small metal coil, or stent, into the clogged artery to help prop it open. The stent lowers the chance of the artery narrowing again.

For years, heart patients in Beckley and surrounding areas had to be transported to Charleston Area Medical Center for a cardiac angioplasty.

“This is an area where patients just have to travel so far,” she said. “The longer you have to wait to get the service, the more likely you’re going to have heart damage.

“If the heart is so damaged, they’re only going to get back to a certain level. I know people who have had angioplasty (quickly) and they’re back to work in a matter of weeks, working to the capacity in which they left.”

Bowling said RGH sent around 200 patients per year to CAMC for emergency angioplasty.

Elective cardiac angioplasty can prevent heart attacks.

“You go to your doctor, you have a stress test, and the test is positive,” Bowling said. “It could mean one coronary artery is narrowed and not getting enough blood supply.

“So you go in before you have the heart attack, hopefully, and you get that coronary artery opened with the stent.

“That allows the blood supply to continue to flow in the heart.”

RGH already performs diagnostic catheterizations, which detect artery blockages.

“If you do a diagnostic cath and find the person had a blockage, then we’d have to send them to Charleston to have something done,” she said. “So now when we do a cardiac catheterization, we’ll have the opportunity for the person to be taken care of at RGH.”

Prior to June 2008, only hospitals with full cardiac units could provide angioplasty services.

Although RGH and other medium-sized hospitals successfully challenged the rule, RGH faced yet another roadblock: Under HCA’s new proposed guidelines, hospitals located a “one hour drive” away from a hospital already offering the services were ineligible for a CON.

The revised HCA standard was on Gov. Joe Manchin’s desk, ready to be signed, when Bowling met with the governor and asked him to reconsider the “one-hour” rule.

Bowling and other hospital CEOs were successful in getting the “drive time” changed to “medical transport time,” from when the patient arrives with a heart problem at the hospital to the point the ambulance reaches CAMC.

In September, RGH filed for a CON.

“I was born and raised in southern West Virginia, so I think to some degree, any time you are from an area, it certainly drives you to want the best for the people where you grew up and where you live,” she said. “I certainly care deeply about the people in southern West Virginia, and this is a new way to assure people are getting quality care.”

Bowling said RGH will now be hiring two interventional cardiologists. Negotiations with the doctors are already under way.

Costs for the cardiac angioplasty program will be around $2 million.

An existing diagnostic catheterization laboratory will be totally renovated and outfitted with the “latest and greatest technology” to provide the most up-to-date care, Bowling said.

Patient rooms are being updated and additional step-down rooms are being created to monitor patients for 24 hours following angioplasty.

Additional staff training will also be implemented, she said.

RGH can begin providing cardiac angioplasty as early as this summer, Bowling said.