Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

We did a study to find out if the way healthcare providers prevent blood clots in neurocritically ill (NCI) patients is similar to recommended, evidence-based care. We used medical databases of all NCI patients in Alberta to find out what is being done to prevent blood clots in these patients. We compared what is current blood clot prevention in this population to what the guidelines recommend. Why? Guidelines, documents that make evidence-based recommendations for care, can help improve the quality of care and in turn the outcomes of care. Healthcare providers do not always follow guideline recommendations. For example, guidelines to prevent blood clots that start in the extremities and can travel to the lung where they can be life threatening, are not always used. This may be especially true in people who are NCI. What did we find? Blood clot prevention and guideline recommended prevention are not always the same. The recommended care was similar to current care if the guideline recommended mechanical forms of prevention and less similar if the guideline recommended drugs to prevent blood clots. Also, NCI patients were more likely to get mechanical forms of preventing blood clots and this increased the chance of getting a blood clot. Why does this matter? 1/3 of NCI patients do not get the drugs that are recommended to prevent blood clots and this puts them at risk of getting a blood clot, which could be life threatening. It is likely that healthcare providers are uncertain about the risks of giving the recommended drugs to prevent blood clots in NCI patients. This study helps guide future work in adapting and collating existing guideline recommendations for preventing blood clots in this population to make the guidelines easier for healthcare providers to use. Using guidelines to inform how blood clots are prevented in NCI patients may reduce the risk of getting life threatening blood clots. This work can help inform similar work in other populations.