Johns Hopkins Study Highlights Patient Role in Successful Use of Clot-Busting Drugs
BALTIMORE — A new study from Johns Hopkins Medicine suggests that patient education and feedback to nurses can help improve the administration of clot-busting drugs and prevent a serious post-surgery complication.
Venous thromboembolism is a potentially deadly condition in which a blood clot, known as a deep vein thrombosis, forms in the deep veins of the leg, groin or arm and may dislodge.
If that happens, the clot can travel via the bloodstream to lodge in the lungs and cause tissue damage or death from reduced oxygen, a condition called pulmonary embolism.
Low doses of blood-thinning medications have been shown to reduce the risk of getting a blood clot by up to 60%.
For the people most vulnerable to VTE — patients who are or have recently been hospitalized, especially for surgery — missing or skipping prescribed prophylactic medications can be dangerous.
This can happen due to many reasons, including patient misunderstanding of the medication’s importance or miscommunication among patients and medical staff members about how and when it should be administered.
Based on the findings from a recent randomized trial of quality improvement interventions, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers suggest that a program of patient education plus individualized nurse performance feedback and coaching can significantly reduce the amount of missed or refused doses of VTE-preventing drugs.
The study was first posted online Sept. 1, 2022, in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, VTE kills some 100,000 people each year, with approximately half developing their VTE associated with hospitalization,” says study lead author Dr. Elliott Haut, Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “
We’ve shown that an effective intervention can help bring those numbers down for patients who are hospitalized.”
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