Bad Gastein DVT Multidisciplinary Think Tank Meeting, October 2008

As a member of IAPO I took part in the workshop in DVT and PE. The meeting was held in October 2008 in Austria. Some of IAPO members had a chance to be there to participate in the European Health Forum.
It was very useful for me because just now I am going to publish a leaflet about DVT in hospital – it will inform that the disease occurs in patients who are admitted to hospital, explain what and how serious DVT is and who is in the risk group for VTE (DVT plus PE are known under collective term of venous thromboembolism). Participants of the meeting could learn how to inform patients about the disease.
I very much appreciated the form of presentation made by Professor Ajay Kakkar, director of the Thrombosis Research Institute. He provided us with information on the critical health problem that causes enormous health consequences and deaths worldwide (even in the USA it is up to 600000 each year and 480000 in Europe). All speakers invited to the meeting provided statistic data in their region. As patients’ representatives we tried to emphasize what should be done to make people more aware of these issues. We proposed a few ways that could help to encourage patients and NGO’s to broaden their knowledge about DVT. Our objective is to create a common project to provide information on the disease to the European population as well as people in other parts of the world. We suggested to select a risk group in all hospitals to give the patients more information and get them involved in the problem if they stay at hospital for a longer period of time. We worked in a group of four so now we are aware what to do as clinicians, as policy makers, industry representatives and patients. We have the same goal but we need to use different tools to improve the situation. At each level it is possible to take actions which may reduce the occurrence of deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. I can see in WAPS perspective a challenge to encourage people interested in these issues to find new ways of preventing and treating the disease. We should raise consumer awareness about DVT/PE, educate people on the symptoms, risk factors , as well as genetic predispositions, share information about the mortality problem, give patients suffering from DVT/PE information in the form of short stories on the disease. We should also ensure that information, the universal message about DVT/PE, is disseminated.
Jolanta Bilińska, Patient Safety Foundation,  Poland