We have updated our Birchmount Hospital phone lines. When you call through the main line (416-495-2400), you will need to add “7” when dialing an extension.

Structural Heart Disease Clinic – TAVI

Scarborough Health Network’s (SHN) Structural Heart Disease Clinic provides access to highly-specialized cardiac services closer to home for patients suffering from aortic stenosis, a serious heart valve disease, in Scarborough and surrounding communities.

What We Offer

Located at SHN’s regional cardiac care centre at Centenary Hospital, our Structural Heart Disease Clinic supports patients throughout their journey of care. The clinic team of  interventional and diagnostic cardiologists, cardiac surgeon, and a nurse practitioner provide:

  • Consultation and multidisciplinary assessments for procedure suitability
  • State-of-the-art diagnostic testing
  • Arrangement of valve repair treatments, including trans-catheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), which is performed by an SHN cardiologist at a cardiac facility at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
  • Tracking of patients’ status through their care journey up to their procedure
  • Recovery on-site at Centenary and post-procedural follow-ups

TAVI treatment to repair heart valve

The TAVI procedure is the most common way to treat aortic stenosis, because it’s minimally-invasive with a much shorter recovery time. Patients are able to go home the next day after the procedure, and feel better within a couple of days.

SHN collaborates with Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre to review patient cases under consideration for TAVI. If a patient is determined to be eligible for TAVI, SHN staff will connect with the Sunnybrook team to set up the procedure at their facility. An SHN interventional cardiologist will perform the TAVI procedure at Sunnybrook within a few weeks after the CT scan at Centenary.

Assessing patients for TAVI procedure

Through SHN’s Structural Heart Disease Clinic, patients have access to several diagnostic investigations that allow the clinic team to determine options for treatment. Testing includes echocardiograms, possible repeat aortograms (a kind of catheterization procedure), as well as a computerized tomography (CT) scan of the heart that helps specifically to check suitability and planning for TAVI.

The TAVI CT is performed using an advanced CT machine with sophisticated software that can get high enough quality images to obtain accurate measurements and mapping of the aortic valve.

Clinic Information

Hours

The Structural Heart Disease Clinic is located at SHN’s Regional Cardiac Care Centre at Centenary Hospital. The clinic is open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Contact Us

Call for appointment inquiries: 416-431-8167
Call for general inquiries: 416-284-8131 ext. 7504
Fax referral forms: 437-780-5541

For more questions or information, email us at structuralheartclinic@shn.ca.

Making a referral

Ocean eReferral

This unit now accepts Ocean eReferrals! For additional information, please email your Ontario Health East Deployment Team at contact@ereferralontarioeast.ca.

Registering for Ocean

SHN, the Scarborough Ontario Health Team (SOHT), and Scarborough Family Physicians Network (SFPN) are working together to support healthcare providers in our community who may be interested in onboarding onto Ocean. Get started by completing the Ontario Health East online form.

Fax Referral