The Society of Chest Pain Centers has named the University of Arizona Medical Center a nationally accredited chest pain center.

In order to receive this accreditation, which is awarded to medical facilities that exhibit expertise in dealing with heart attack patients, the center had to pass a rigorous application process that was based on the center’s ability to assess, diagnose and treat patients who may be experiencing a heart attack.

“It was a team effort with nurse clinicians, hospitalists, cardiologists, all of our technicians in the cardiac cath lab and the non-invasive cardiac lab, radiology technicians, the ER staff and nurses,” said Dr. Joseph Alpert, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the UA College of Medicine, in a press release last week.

The center was specifically accredited as a “chest pain center with PCI.” PCI, short for Percutaneous Coronary Intervention, is a procedure more commonly known as angioplasty. This procedure is used to treat the narrowed coronary arteries of the heart that occur with coronary heart disease.

Sharon Gregoire, a family and acute care nurse practitioner at the medical center, led the accreditation process. In the press release, Gregoire said, “The cardiac service here has been committed for many years to being a comprehensive program, and for us this was a formalization and standardization of processes that were already in place.”

About 5 percent of the approximately 70,000 patients that the center sees in its emergency department every year are there because they are experiencing chest pain. Gregoire emphasized that early attention to chest pain can be critical to saving lives.

“Early recognition of heart attack and early treatment saves lives,” Gregoire said in the release.