Background and Objectives
Majority of the medical and surgical emergency procedures being dependent on Blood and blood components, it has played a vital role in patient management. This enlightens the importance and need of proper utilization of blood and its components by ensuring minimal wastage. The main objective of the study is to determine the percentage and causes of blood and blood component wastage out of the total blood collected.
Methods
A retrospective cross - sectional study with convenience sampling of donors from January 2015 to December 2020 was done in a blood bank of a tertiary care hospital located in western Maharashtra.
Results
Out of the total blood bags collected, 411 (0.028 %) blood bag units were discarded due to seropositivity. After segregation of the collected blood bags, a total of 373 whole blood bags discarded and 2588 platelet bags had to be discarded. The most common reason for discard of platelet bags were due to expiry. A total of 1789 FFP bags were disposed due to various reasons, while, only 131 bags of PCV and 85 bags of plasma were discarded, the main reasons of discard being expiry of the PCV bags (74.8 %) and cryo - poor plasma respectively (98 %). Cryoprecipitate bags that were discarded consisted of a total of 235, out of which 150 (63.8 %) bags were disposed due to expiry of the cryoprecipitate bags.
Interpretation and Conclusion
Blood being an irreplaceable and important resource, needs to be properly utilized and ideally zero percent wastage should be encouraged. Training programmers for doctors on usage of blood / blood components is highly recommended.
