The Bermuda Heart Foundation has teamed up with New York Presbyterian Hospital to provide better service to patients.

Now, the US hospital will work with the foundation’s Core Heart Health Centre to provide expert doctors.

Burak Malatyali, vice-president of Strategic Alliances and Global Services at New York Presbyterian, said: “This collaboration is ideal for both citizens of Bermuda and our medical centre and hospital.

“We ideally love to see how we can help patients who have heart disease. But in this situation, with a facility like the Core Heart Health Centre, we can bring services to people and help them through all these different issues.

“It really is a win-win for both programmes.”

Simone Barton, CEO of the Bermuda Heart Foundation, said that the two organisations had worked together in the past but decided to join forces again in an effort to improve care for Bermudian patients.

She described NYP as one of the best hospitals for cardiology in the United States and added that it had strong ties with both Columbia and Cornell universities.

Dr Malatyali said that there would probably be two physicians from NYP at Core on a rotating basis, including Christopher Irobunda, a faculty member at Columbia University Medical Centre, and one from Cornell.

Dr Malatyali added: “I think complementing what Core already has with a clinical resource is really beneficial for co-ordinating care and making sure that patients are handled properly.”

Dr Irobunda added that the programme gives patients in Bermuda the opportunity to have experts from New York review their cases.

He said: “It is a situation where Bermudians who have seen other doctors can come and get a second opinion and pose any questions they might have about their health. That’s something we can offer.”

Ms Barton said that the partnership would only strengthen the services already being offered by the Heart Foundation and Core, which aimed to address health issues before they escalated.

She added: “We train people how to do health in a way that’s not expensive, because everybody thinks it’s expensive. You can eat the foods you love in moderation and balance and still achieve your objectives,” she said.

“It’s a holistic approach that basically feeds off the person that they are, not the person that the books or magazines tell them they need to be.

“It has actually been medically proven that diets do more harm than good because the yo-yo factor is not good for your overall health, so you teach people to modify their life instead of trying to diet their way out of bad behaviour.”

Ms Barton highlighted the impact that diabetes had on the island.

She said: “We lead the globe in amputations. No other country has more amputations than we do.

Ms Barton added: “We had a 17.5 per cent growth rate in 2015 in kidney disease. These are all modifiable risks that can be managed if you get out of it instead of waiting for it to become a full-blown disease.”