Preventing Venous Thromboembolism in Hospital

Bayer Schering Pharma, in partnership with Anticoagulation Europe are pleased to offer a Toolkit, as a guide in assessing and improving clinical practice in the prevention of venous thromboembolism in hospital.

This toolkit has been developed in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of NHS healthcare professionals and Trust managers to make life easier for anyone involved in providing, managing or commissioning VTE thromboprophylaxis. Whatever your role in the implementation or management of local VTE thromboprophylaxis, you should find a number of useful resources in this toolkit.

Depending on your local needs, the toolkit should help you to:

• Assess your current VTE thromboprophylaxis service
• Design appropriate objectives at every level to achieve full implementation of thromboprophylaxis
• Support local action in meeting these objectives by providing you with a range of resources.

This process of improving local thromboprophylaxis is in line with the latest NHS Confederation briefing on reducing deaths from blood clots in hospitals¹.

The toolkit offers practical solutions to the wide-ranging challenges associated with the effective local implementation and management of VTE thromboprophylaxis, by:

• Helping healthcare professionals to gain a better understanding of the burden of VTE in general, the need for action, and the range of currently available guidelines on VTE thromboprophylaxis
• Providing a practical guide and framework to facilitate the overall assessment of local VTE thromboprophylaxis services (including local VTE risk assessment methods), identify any gaps, and determine whether specific action is needed
• Offering a range of resources that may be used to support local action in addressing any gaps identified, backed up by examples of how other organisations have tackled the problem in their own locality

The resources in this toolkit should therefore help Trusts to achieve – and demonstrate –
compliance with best practice in VTE prevention ahead of any future CQC assessment.

This toolkit is suitable for use by anyone who is involved in the provision, management and
commissioning of VTE thromboprophylaxis services.

• Providers of VTE thromboprophylaxis (e.g. consultants, nurses, pharmacists, primary care clinicians) and Trust managers can use this toolkit to assess their own compliance with the latest national guidance in a realistic manner, to set objectives for improvement – and potentially, to reduce clinical, operational and financial risk in practice
• Commissioners of healthcare can use this toolkit to assess the problem of VTE across their healthcare community, to prioritise investment – and to support contracting and performance monitoring processes

Reference:

1 - NHS Confederation briefing: Reducing deaths from blood clots in hospitals. May 2009.

The development of this Toolkit has been sponsored and organised by Bayer Schering Pharma.
Item code number: UK.PH.GM.XAR.2010.08
Date of preparation: January 2010