Warfarin Management News and Views

For the nurses treating the estimated one million patients on oral anticoagulation therapy (OAT) there isn’t any margin for error. They need complete accuracy and total trust in the tools they use to determine patient dosage levels.   

For the Primary Care Trust (PCT), warfarin management has customarily been a routine but time consuming part of their function, necessitating regular outpatient appointments to assess clotting times. There simply isn’t any way around this – regular testing ensures that patients receive appropriate levels of care, and that optimum dosage of warfarin is always prescribed. There are, however, huge cost savings to be made simply by moving the testing out of hospitals – and conducting them in the patients’ local clinics.

A modern warfarin management approach

Axis-Shield UK is working with PCTs to change the way they manage their OAT patients. Our portable testing device, Thrombotrack, provides accurate and immediate results from a single finger prick test. The ramifications are enormous:

• For the patients – no repetitious and time consuming trips to hospital, no waiting for results.
• For the PCT – huge savings from significantly fewer hospital outpatient appointments and a commensurate reduction in associated costs.
• For the nurses – immediate results enable the most finely tuned and responsive care for their patients.

This is a timely revolution in patient care. It is predicted that the number of people in need of OAT is set to rise sharply over the next few years. Presently almost two thirds of patients with atrial fibrillation remain unidentified – and when they are identified it could add up two and a half million more patients onto the warfarin treatment registers. And what’s that going to cost the PCTs?

Find out more about Thrombotrack on our web site

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