Guidelines for clinical use of blood

11. Guidelines for Clinical Use of Blood and Blood Components

The director and other staff members of blood transfusion centre should actively interact with the clinicians and formulate guidelines for effective and optimal use of blood and blood components.

Blood and blood components should be requested for only if other modes of therapy have proved ineffective and if the benefit of transfusion outweights the risk associated with it. Following broad guidelines should be followed.

Use of red cell and platelet concentrate, fresh frozen plasma and cryoprecipitate as indicated.

As far as possible transfusion of whole blood should be avoided and efforts should be made to initiate blood component therapy. If the transfusion service does not have the facility for preparing blood components, all efforts of the technical experts and hospital administrators should be directed to initiate blood component preparation in thç blood transfusion service.

As far as possible, fresh blood transfusion with < 3 days old red cells and single unit transfusion should not be used.

Transfusion avoidance strategies should be followed.

Transfusion trigger may be lowered to <7gIdl haemoglobin value specially if the fall in I-lb had not been rapid.

Efforts should be made to reduce number of donor exposures to a patient.

Programme for autologous blood transfusion should be initiated, promoted and sustained.