Results of a venous thromboembolism prophylaxis program for hospitalized patients

Abstract

Results of a venous thromboembolism prophylaxis program for hospitalized patients Luiz Francisco Cardoso, Daniella Vianna C Krokoscz, Edison Ferreira de Paiva, Ilka Spinola Furtado, Jorge Mattar Jr, Marcia Martiniano de Souza e Sá, Antonio Carlos Onofre de Lira Sírio Libanês Hospital, São Paulo, Brazil Introduction: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the leading cause of preventable death in hospitalized patients. However, existing prophylaxis guidelines are rarely followed. Objective: The aim of the study was to present and discuss implementation strategies and the results of a VTE prophylaxis program for medical and surgical patients admitted to a large general hospital. Patients and methods: This prospective observational study was conducted to describe the strategy used to implement a VTE prophylaxis program in hospitalized medical and surgical patients and to analyze the results in terms of the risk assessment rate within the first 24 hours after admission, adequacy of the prophylaxis prescription, and prevalence of VTE in the discharge records before and after program implementation. We used the Mantel–Haenszel chi-square test for the linear trend of the data analysis and set the significance level to P