Cardiac Rehabilitation at St. Joseph Medical Center

What is Cardiac Rehabilitation?

Cardiac rehabilitation is a medically supervised program to help heart patients recover quickly and improve their overall physical, mental and social functioning. The goal is to stabilize, slow or even reverse the progression of cardiovascular disease, thereby reducing the risk of heart disease, another cardiac event or death. Our cardiac rehabilitation program is designed to meet the needs of the individual patient, depending on the specific heart problem or disease.

The cardiac rehabilitation program includes:

• Counseling so the patient can understand and manage the disease process
• Beginning an exercise program
• Counseling on nutrition
• Helping the patient modify risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, high blood cholesterol, physical inactivity, obesity and diabetes.
• Providing vocational guidance to enable the patient to return to work
• Supplying information on physical limitations
• Lending emotional support
• Counseling on appropriate use of prescribed medications

Cardiac rehabilitation is helpful to patients with angina pectoris (chest pain due to clogged heart arteries), recent heart attack, stent placement or balloon angioplasty. It is also helpful to patients with recent open heart surgery to include coronary artery bypass graft surgery, heart valve surgery or heart transplant.

Cardiac rehabilitation is divided in to three phases:

Phase I
A critical care nurse will meet with you during your acute hospital stay.

Phase II
A critical care nurse and an exercise physiologist work with you to individualize a structured exercise and educational program. This program is provided at St. Joseph Health Network Spring Ridge and is covered by most insurance.
St. Joseph Health Network Spring Ridge

Phase III
This is our maintenance program where professional exercise physiologists will work with you to design a program at St. Joseph Health Network Shelbourne. This program is open to the general public and is a self-pay program.
St. Joseph Health Network Shelbourne