Inside your arteries: Dr Alex Elder welcomes $150,000 OCT donation at Orange Hospital

A state-of-the-art Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) machine is now running at the hospital's Cardiac Cath Lab, enabling clinicians to get a more accurate picture of a patient's arteries following a stent procedure.

The purchase of the machine was made possible by Cadia Valley Operations, with a contribution of $102,000, and the Orange Hospital Auxiliary with $50,000.

An OCT machine uses infrared light to provide high-definition images of an artery to help determine the severity of coronary disease and provide accurate measurements to help guide and analyse stent selection, placement and deployment.

Interventional cardiologist at Orange Hospital Dr Alex Elder said the OCT machine helps optimise the treatment for heart attack patients.

"What the OCT does is it allows us to take pictures within the artery itself," Dr Elder said..

"We unblock the artery with a balloon and a stent, then we can run the OCT catheter through that, studying how the stent's been deployed, making sure it's deployed in the right size and manner and it helps us to optimise stent results."

Orange Hospital is the referral area for the central west of the state which Dr Elder pointed out is the size of the United Kingdom, running from Lithgow to Lightning Ridge in the north, out to Cobar in the west and Lake Cargelligo in the south. It represents a population of around 270,000.

"[Orange] is where you'd come if you're having a heart attack," he said.

"This is large sums of money which have been made available for the purchase of this equipment and we're the only centre in the Central West which has OCT now, which will really help out patients and the community of Orange."

Dr Elder said Orange was one of the top 10 busiest cath labs in NSW.

"It's quite a remarkable number given that we're quite a small hospital by comparison. We're up there with the major tertiary referral hospitals in Sydney in terms of the number of heart attacks that we treat and that's purely on a basis that we [cover] such a large area."

"It's the tyranny of distance, the distance makes it challenging to treat heart attacks out here because it's time critical that we get the patients here to the cath lab where we can deliver the treatment that they need.

"We run this service 24-7 so you'll often find us in the cath lab at 2am."

Orange Health Service general manager Catherine Nowlan said previously the hospital had been utilising a loan machine.

"We are incredibly grateful to both Cadia Valley Operations and the Orange Hospital Auxiliary for their generous donations, which have made this possible. Having this technology as a permanent fixture in our Cardiac Cath Lab will help us ensure patients' treatment remains world-class," she said.

Cadia Valley Operations has been supporting the NSW Health in the western region for about 20 years, according to acting social performance superintendent Melissa O'Brien.

"The Auxiliary put in all the hard work in raising part of the funds for the new OCT machine and came to us with a proposal to fund the remainder," she said.

"Each year we run a community partnership program and health is one of the really strong pillars we support, particularly Orange Health Service given a large number of our workforce resides in Orange."

Orange Hospital Auxiliary vice-president Jenny Butler described the OCT purchase as "wonderful".

"We are totally volunteer-based and our aim is to raise money for exactly this kind of technology," she said.

"Our contribution started this ball rolling and Cadia Valley Operations took over from there. To see this type of machine installed makes all our effort worthwhile."

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