PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Safraz Hamid
AU  - Benjamin Gallo Marin
AU  - Leanna Smith
AU  - Kwasi Agyeman-Kagya
AU  - Christopher George
AU  - Tara Wetzler
AU  - Abbasali Badami
AU  - Adam Gendy
AU  - Valery Roudnitsky
TI  - Improving SCD compliance in trauma patients at Kings County Hospital Center: a quality improvement report
AID  - 10.1136/bmjoq-2020-001171
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - BMJ Open Quality
PG  - e001171
VI  - 10
IP  - 1
4099  - http://bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/10/1/e001171.short
4100  - http://bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/10/1/e001171.full
SO  - BMJ Open Qual2021 Jan 01; 10
AB  - Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the fourth most commonly reported complication in trauma patients. For these patients, thromboprophylaxis is a standard of care. Patient compliance with sequential compression devices (SCDs), a form of mechanical VTE prophylaxis, has been a focus of efforts to improve patient safety. At our institution, a baseline audit in July 2020 revealed that patients admitted to the trauma floors have poor compliance with the use of SCDs. In this quality improvement project, we developed a patient education intervention to improve SCD compliance. We distributed an informational flyer to patients and led short educational sessions on VTE risk factors and proper SCD use. Our aim was to increase our SCD compliance rate by 30% in 4 weeks. We used three plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles to implement and refine our intervention. We measured SCD compliance during morning and afternoon patient observations and generated run charts to understand how our cycles were leading to change. After a 4-week period, we did not achieve our aim, but increased our overall compliance from 45% to 60% and sustained this improvement throughout our PDSA cycles. Morning compliance was lower than afternoon compliance both at baseline (45% vs 48.5%) and at the end the project (45% vs 53%). Our results suggest that patient education should be coupled with interventions that address other barriers to SCD compliance.