Background: Excessive ordering of blood components imposes heavy costs to blood transfusion centers and increases the amount of blood product wastage due to lack of their use. In recent years, attempts have been made against unnecessary blood and blood product requests in our country. We aimed to investigate the frequency of blood and blood product wasting in healthcare centers of Yazd city in Iran.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study data were obtained from questionnaires, software system of hospital blood banks and data extracted from medical records. PPS (probability proportional to size) was applied as sampling method. Required samples were collected randomly from each hospital. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.
Results: In total, 171, 147, 465 request forms for fresh frozen plasma (FFP), platelets, and RBC were evaluated. Approximately, 11%, 6%, and 21.5% of FFP, platelets and RBC units were discarded in the hospitals, respectively. The highest rate of blood component wastage belonged to burns (23%), ICU (22%), surgery (20%) and Thalassemia (20%) departments. Expiring which caused the products to be discarded was the most common cause of blood wastage (82%). “cross match to transfusion ratio” which is a standard quotient in transfusion medicine was 2.9-8 in these medical centers.
Conclusion: The most common causes of blood wasting were lack of definite indications to transfuse blood products, long term storage of blood products without their consumption or discharging the patients not receiving any transfusion. Therefore, it is possible to reduce blood and blood products wastage through proper management of requests and their rational use.