without a team
approach across
multiple disciplines,
physician and staff
engagement, and
executive support.
We gathered input
and provided educa-
tion to clinical lead-
ers and directors,
surgeons, hospital-
ists, emergency
department physi-
cians, quality partners and frontline staff.
You need to make sure that every disciplinary piece of your VTE puz-
zle is engaged and informed during this process.
2. Mind the gaps
Identify gaps that could be increasing the patient's risk for develop-
ing VTE. Our hospital's VTE committee reviewed our protocols and
asked important questions that led to process improvement: What
are we currently doing? What should we keep doing? What are some
new ideas? What are some ideas that won't work, or can't work, or
need to put on the back burner?
Because of the urgency of our situation, we decided to focus on
low-hanging fruit — namely, turning VTE prevention into a nurse-dri-
ven protocol, starting in pre-op. This provided nurses the autonomy to
make decisions within their scope of practice to improve patient out-
comes.
The first intervention was the development and implementation of a
O C T O B E R 2 0 1 9 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 1 0 9
• PUMP AND GO Mobile sequential compression devices keep blood flowing to the
extremities as patients move from pre-op to PACU.