In February 1966, health care professionals brought an amazing medical first to the Mid-South at the Baptist Medical Center. After two years of construction, Baptist opened the area’s first coronary care unit. It was only the fifth of its kind in the United States at the time and was pioneered by a physician named Dr. Maury Bronstein.
In the early 1960s, approximately one-third of heart attack patients who reached the hospital died. This was a national statistic that Dr. Bronstein, chief of staff at the Baptist Medical Center at that time, noted at an American Heart Association meeting in San Francisco in 1964 and verified by extensive chart research of Baptist patients. Dr. Bronstein and Dr. J. Pervis Milnor Jr. attended the conference where Dr. Hughes Day, who opened the first coronary care unit in the United States at Bethany Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., presented the concept of a coronary care unit.
When they returned from the conference, Dr. Bronstein presented his vision for a coronary care unit to the Baptist department of medicine. Dr. Frank Groner, who served as president and CEO of Baptist from 1946-1980, approved the idea.
Before designing the coronary care unit at Baptist, Dr. Bronstein and other physicians toured several across the country, including The Miami Heart Institute, which ultimately became the template for the Baptist unit. Joe Powell, who was a Baptist vice president at the time and later served as president and CEO from 1980-1994, drew up the plans for the coronary care unit.
“The standard of care 50 years ago for a heart attack, before opening the coronary care unit, was total bed rest, various medications and oxygen. The standard of care changes as science changes,” said Dr. Bronstein. “Coronary arteriography was the next modality to alter the delivery of care.”
The unit was built with eight of the 10 beds around a bay where nurses could see into all of the rooms from a single station. From the station, a nurse would push a button to see an immediate electrocardiogram on any of the patients. This was a new concept in the late 1960s, when reading EKGs was typically a doctor’s job.
Cardiac monitoring devices were also in each of the 10 patient rooms to monitor patient heart activity at all times. Two “crash carts” carrying cardiac defibrillators were in the unit to offer additional safeguards for patients, and all coronary care unit nurses were capable of using them if needed.
The goal of the coronary care unit was to offer physicians a place to send their patients for treatment.
Dr. Norman Davis was also very active in planning the coronary care unit and was chairman of the unit from 1966 until his death in 1977.
When it came time to open the unit, nurses from the Baptist School of Nursing, now the Baptist Health Sciences University, were clamoring to work there. Mary Ann Northern was one of them.
“Dr. Bronstein started the direction of my career. I love cardiology because of my time spent in the coronary care unit,” Mary Ann said.
Mary Ann and nurse Jean Cooley, the coronary care unit supervisor for several years, worked to develop a course training for nurses working on the unit.
“The coronary care unit expanded the role of the nurses tremendously,” said Mary Ann. “Nurses were key to the unit because the doctors weren’t always there.”
“This felt like home—the place to work,” said Kathy Leake, a Baptist School of Nursing graduate. She, along with many other student nurses, was on a waiting list to get to work in the unit.
Kathy still works in the Baptist system, in performance improvement at Baptist Memphis. Beverly Jordan, who is now vice president and chief information and transformation officer for the Baptist system, worked the night nursing shift in the coronary care unit in 1977. Dr. Betty Sue McGarvey, who is now president of the Baptist Health Sciences University, worked in the unit from 1978-1979.
Dr. Bronstein retired in 2006 after working as an internist and cardiologist with Baptist for 50 years. He was the first recipient of the Baptist Foundation’s Award of Distinction for Emeritus Physicians in 2006. The former chief of staff and president of the medical staff of the hospital, Dr. Bronstein also served as president of the Memphis Heart Association and the Memphis Academy of Internal Medicine. Additionally, he spent many years teaching at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and retired as a clinical associate professor.
Within two years of opening the unit, the heart attack death rate of hospitalized patients dropped from 33 percent to 18 percent, according to Dr. Bronstein.
“The coronary care unit was opened at a time when specialized care wasn’t offered in Memphis so Dr. Bronstein was a pioneer and had great foresight in transforming the delivery of cardiac care,” said Jason Little, president and CEO of Baptist Memorial Health Care.