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Presentation Description
Institution: Tauranga Hospital - Bay of Plenty, Aotearoa New Zealand
Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) surveillance is essential to reducing aneurysm-related complications, yet many services rely on manual tracking systems with limited visibility of surveillance activity and population-level trends. Within our service, surveillance was managed using a manually maintained spreadsheet requiring ongoing clinician data entry, annual record migration, manual surveillance calculations, and individual oversight. While functional, the system provided limited audit capability and little ability to understand the wider surveillance population.
To address these challenges, a Nurse Practitioner-led AAA surveillance platform was developed using Microsoft Excel. While remaining clinician-managed, the platform incorporates evidence-based surveillance intervals based on aneurysm diameter, automated due date calculations, reminder notifications, overdue surveillance alerts, and visual dashboards. Additional fields capture demographic, clinical, and treatment data including ethnicity, smoking status, intervention history, and geographical location.
The platform has transformed surveillance from a static patient register into a practical clinical governance tool. For the first time, the service can visualise its AAA population, identify patients requiring follow-up, monitor equity indicators, support quality improvement initiatives, and better understand future service demand. Visibility of aneurysm size distribution and surveillance status also supports planning for vascular clinic capacity, EVAR workload, and radiology resource allocation.
This innovation demonstrates how structured surveillance data can generate meaningful clinical insight. The value lies not simply in the database itself, but in making the surveillance population visible, measurable, and actionable.
Patients who are visible can be monitored. Patients who are monitored can be appropriately managed.
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Authors
Authors
Mr Alex Dowds -

