 What makes for excellence in heart care? It starts with one of the most amazing teams of heart surgeons and cardiologists that I've seen assembled under one roof and the region's leading technology in a new $40 million facility. This is the nationally recognized Heart and Vascular Institute of Eastern Kentucky at Pikeville Medical Center. National Heart Health Month has begun and PMC is doing their part by providing free blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose screenings every weekend in February. Freebie Friday will take place across several locations, the first of which will be in the atrium in Pikeville Medical Center. Anyone is welcome and no appointment is needed. Freebie Friday we're going to be offering blood pressure checks, we're going to also be checking glucose, blood sugars and some cholesterol checks and all three of these can help determine heart disease or if somebody's having high blood pressure, we want to get that checked out. If they have high cholesterol we definitely want to get that checked out because those can lead to heart attacks. We have done it before and it was very successful and we was able to get a couple patients straight to the physician to be seen and that's really what we're looking for. The locations later this month will be February 10th at the Whitesburg Clinic, February 17th at the South Williamson Clinic and February 24th at the Prestonsburg Urgent Care Clinic. Scott says it's important to regularly check your blood pressure to be aware of any potential warning signs. Kentucky has a high rate of heart attacks among males and females so we want to try to combat some of that, we'll do some education at these Freebie Fridays as well, answer any questions that we can and make sure we stress the size of a heart attack for both male and female which can be different for both cholesterol-inherited issues. So if you have high cholesterol you definitely want to get that checked at least every three months is usually what the physicians will do. If it's under control they'll do it every three months and maybe even every six months so you definitely want to go and and have those frequent checks with your physician as often as you can. Being the chest pain coordinator I have seen a lot of patients that have had heart attacks and we have caught those and they've done really well. It's very important to get to this hospital if you're having chest pain, come straight to the hospital, don't wait, call an ambulance and get over here and we can treat you. It's time as muscle so when you're here we can get you to the cath lab and we'll get you taken care of and successfully treated. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.