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
Jolanta Bilińska, Robinath Kaitiritimba -Uganda
