In the spring of 1967, the world looked a lot different than it does today. Lyndon B. Johnson was president of the United States; Sean Connery’s James Bond was still raking in the box office dollars and The Beatles were preparing to release the biggest album of their careers – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In Canton, Ohio, things looked different at Aultman, too. It was in that year that the hospital launched a unit that celebrates its 50^th anniversary this month – the Cardiac Care Unit.

The CCU opened on April 10, 1967, on Harter 3 with a mere two beds. A couple of years later, the rapidly expanding unit relocated to Memorial 6 North, where it gained 30 beds total – 10 ICU and 20 step-down beds. Meanwhile, the heart lab also began operations.

For the next decade, the program continued to grow. By the fall of 1980, the CCU moved yet again to Memorial 3 East, where it added ten more beds to its number. By 1981, the Cardiovascular Surgical Intensive Care Unit opened, and the CCU was sending the first of many patients into open-heart surgery.

In 1998, a group of nurses pushed to further expand CCU operations by adding a Chest Pain Center in the emergency department. The Chest Pain Center still exists today, and it’s still staffed by CCU nurses.

Since then, the CCU has received a wide variety of recognitions, certifications, awards and accolades, including achieving its first chest pain center accreditation from the Society of Chest Pain Centers in 2004 and the Beacon award from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses in 2006. Both of these awards recur every three years, and Aultman has gone on to win them over and over again throughout the intervening years.

In 2006, the CCU grew yet again, expanding into its current 56-bed unit in the Bedford building, with the Chest Pain Center in the ED also gaining six beds.

Up to today, the CCU continues to take exceptional care of heart patients and win much recognition, including the accredited cardiology fellowship that began in 2014 and numerous Mission Lifeline Gold Plus Awards from the American Heart Association for Heart Failure.

Our Nurses Remember

A handful of CCU nurses have been with Aultman for the whole 50-year duration of the CCU. These are some of their memories over the years.

When they first opened the CCU:

"Nursing used to mix their own nitroglycerin drips. I can’t imagine that. I wonder if administration was worried that they’d blow up the hospital.”

In the 1970s:

“Doctors and nurses were allowed to – and frequently did – smoke in patient rooms, along with visitors and patients.”

In the 1980s:

“The toilets in the patient rooms were stored under the cabinets under the sinks. There were no bathrooms in the rooms.”

“Cardiac patients had to have a doctor’s order to have ice water, read a newspaper, accept phone calls (no phones in their rooms) and take their own baths (the nurses had to give sponge baths). There was very minimal activity in those days.”

“Before the noninvasive heart lab opened, the CCU had a procedure room where we would take patients to have cardioversions, TEEs, etc.”