It's the middle of the night or maybe the beginning of a busy workday when you suddenly feel pain in your chest. You try to ignore it at first, but your chest pain has you scared and worried. Could you be having a heart attack? Should you go to the emergency room?

Chest pain is one of the most common reasons people call for emergency medical help. Every year emergency room doctors evaluate and treat millions of people for chest pain.

The aims of the Apollo Chest Pain Clinics are:

Chest pain is the most common symptom of coronary heart disease (CHD). The effective assessment and management of patients with chest pain is central to any strategy to reduce the burden of coronary disease. Furthermore the investigation of patients with chest pain absorbs a substantial proportion of the resources of cardiologists and their departments.

The simple facts of taking patients history to elicit features of ischemic pain, examining and then investigating using established procedures such as exercise testing, functional imaging, and angiography are well described in any textbook of medicine or cardiology. The challenge to senior clinicians is to synthesize a service that brings these principles to the patient in a timely, accessible, consistent and cost conscious format to provide an effective service that takes patients within the population to the correct diagnosis and then onwards along their journey to evidence based treatments.

There are major shortcomings in the existing system for the management of patients developing chest pain. At present, only a minority are referred by their general practitioners for a specialists opinion, despite the difficulties in making the correct diagnosis and the serious consequences of not recognizing an acute coronary syndrome.

Patients referred directly to accident and emergency departments as emergencies may also receive sub-optimal care, not least because they are often assessed by the most junior and hard pressed Doctors. Some patients coming in with chest pain with an acute coronary syndrome may be designated "low risk" or "non-cardiac" and discharged inappropriately, on the basis of having a normal resting electrocardiogram. Still others who are genuinely low risk may be admitted to hospitals unnecessarily.