A medical charity is claiming that Scottish health boards are leaving over one million people at risk of fatal deep vein thrombosis (DVT).
The condition can occur following long-haul air travel or surgery and is most serious when a blood clot breaks loose and travels in the bloodstream to the lungs.
A report published on Wednesday says that health boards in Scotland are failing to take adequate steps to prevent hospital-acquired DVT, which kills an estimated 3000 patients in Scottish hospitals every year.
The report Venous Thromboembolism Challenge In Scotland is based on freedom of information requests to all Scotland’s health boards by thrombosis campaign charity Lifeblood to mark National Thrombosis Week, which ends on Saturday.
The report identifies a series of major shortcomings in practise which, it says, are putting patients’ lives at risk.
The report finds that over 20% of Scottish health boards do not have a thrombosis policy in place to prevent hospital-acquired thrombosis, despite being a preventable killer.
NHS Tayside and NHS Fife told the charity that they do have written policies.
An NHS Fife spokesman said, “Staff are provided with training and audits are carried out to check compliance with policy.
“There is no multi-disciplinary committee in Fife and when necessary we convene an ad hoc multi-disciplinary group.
“Information for patients is based on the format circulated by the chief medical officer.””Matter of urgency”The charity says lack of written policies elsewhere means over one million people in Scotland are not covered by a strategy preventing thrombosis when they go into hospital.
This is despite the fact that the chief medical officer in Scotland wrote to all boards in 2008 requiring them to address thrombosis written policies “as a matter of urgency”, following which all 14 health boards indicated that they were taking action to adopt formal strategies.
Another key finding of the report is that over 25% of boards failed to provide formalised education to staff about patient risk-assessment of hospital-acquired thrombosis. NHS Fife said it provided “ad hoc” training and NHS Tayside did not respond to the question.
In a poll of people in Scotland, also published on Wednesday, 77% of respondents said they wanted to see Scottish hospitals check all in-patients for their risk of developing thrombosis.
The poll also found that half of all people thought the greatest risk of developing DVT was on a long-haul flight and twice as many people thought there was a greater risk of contracting MRSA in hospital than thrombosis.
But an in-patient is two to three times as likely to die from thrombosis as they are to die from a hospital-acquired infection.
Professor Simon Noble, leading haematologist and medical director professor of Lifeblood, said, “Low professional awareness about the risk of thrombosis and the absence of policies to prevent it are needlessly putting patients’ lives at risk and failing to protect vulnerable patients from a completely preventable condition.
“Scottish hospital patients are put at a greater risk of contracting thrombosis than patients in England, where all in-patients are required to be routinely risk-assessed.”
He added, “It is imperative that the Scottish Government follows England’s recent lead and sets targets for the risk-assessment of all hospital in-patients.”
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