Blood Transfusion Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Blood Transfusion, including details on blood donation, blood types, leukemia.

Reengineering transfusion and cellular therapy processes hospitalwide: ensuring the safe utilization of blood products.

Brooks JP

University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Oklahoma City, OK 73104, USA.

Efforts to make blood transfusion as safe as possible have focused on making the blood in the bag as disease-free as possible. The results have been dramatic, and the costs have been correspondingly high. Although blood services will have to continue to deal with emerging pathogens, efforts to reduce the transfusion of infectious agents presently posing a risk will require high incremental costs and result in only improvements of a small magnitude. The other aspect of safe blood transfusion, the actual transfusion process performed primarily in hospitals, has been accorded considerably less interest. We should turn our attention to enhancing overall blood safety by focusing on improving the process of blood transfusion. Errors involving patient, specimen, and blood product identification put transfused patients at risk, increasing the mortality risk for some. Solutions that could improve the transfusion process are discussed as a focus of this article.

Published 26 September 2005 in Transfusion, 45(4): 159S-71S.
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