Switzerland Reports ”courant normal“ in interventional cardiology

In this issue, the Working Group of Interventional Cardiology of the Swiss Society of Cardiology reports about activities in interventional cardiology in the year 2007, 30 years after the world’s first case of coronary angio- plasty on September 16, 1977, at the University Hospital of Zurich (considered to be the starting point of interventional cardiology as a discipline). The authors have to be congratulated on providing a succinct report regarding exciting, yet at the same time mundane activities.

These activities are considered to be exciting because they turn severely handicapped patients and patients at life-threatening risk into normally functioning individuals within a matter of hours, but are also considered to be mundane because they have long become an integral part of daily medical life at all institutions that house a cardiology unit both in the country and around the world. A nagging two-year delay has plagued these traditional annual reports from their initial one in 1989 [1] in spite of the introduction of the Internet, digital data analysis, and online publication production over the past 20 years. It has to be possible to publish such data no later than early in the year being reported on +2, preferably around the middle of the year being reported on +1. The Austrians lead the way. They, too, have not reached the goal of publishing data the subsequent year [2], however they do include on-site audits of the salient figures. This is not yet part of the Swiss reports. In fact, there is still even a black spot in the Swiss statistics, with the Lindenhof Spital in Bern providing no figures. A dent in the ever growing number of...

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