As I have previously written, DVTs can be deadly serious – they can cause pulmonary emboli (PE) to block blood flow to the lungs, resulting in death quickly.

There are many causes of DVT. One of them is surgery.

A postsurgical DVT can occur because when the patient is in surgery, they are necessarily not moving around. DVTs can form in some people in precisely that situation – think of sitting in an airplane for hours at a time or playing a video game and failing to get up and move around every hour or so.

Because a postsurgical DVT can occur in a patient, surgeons not only know it, but are nearly always required to assess a patient’s risk for developing a DVT prior to surgery.

Fortunately, doctors have tools to do these risk assessments – calculators that can be easily accessed through a patient’s electronic medical record system, or simply the internet.

Different risk factors count for different points. Some of the biggest risk factors include how extensive the surgery is, whether the patient has blood clotting disorder, and whether the patient has had a DVT in the past. Count up all the points, and a surgeon can better understand what her patient’s risk of postsurgical DVT is, and how to safely minimize that risk, if necessary.

Often, a patient’s risk is low, so no additional treatments are needed. Sometimes only intraoperative sequential compression devices (SCDs) are necessary to promote venous flow of blood and prevent postsurgical DVT. Or, it may be required to give the patient medication to minimize blood clots following the surgery.

Unfortunately, patients can and do die from resulting PE when surgeons fail to assess a patient’s postsurgical DVT risk, fail to do it correctly, or otherwise fail to avoid the preventable condition of a postsurgical DVT.