Evaluation of the risk analysis technique in Blood Banks Production Processes

System Safety Engineering techniques of risk analysis have been developed in order to identify the potential risks, to eliminate or minimize possible occurrences and accidents in the process industries. Risk management is extremely important in terms of damages to man and animals, and to the environment. However, specially in health service areas, there is a lack of structured procedures for risk management in this area that also consider biosafety aspects. The aim of this work is to adapt, combine, implement and evaluate engineering structuralized techniques in a new application aiming at analyzing the risks that are present in whole blood bag processing. The risks evaluated in the production process are directly associated to the quality and safety of the environment, to the people working in the area, as well as to the procedures involved. The analysis techniques used to identify the risks present are CIT (Critical Incident Technique) and PHA (Preliminary Hazard Analysis). The risk matrix is used to quantify the identified risks, though the correlation between categories of severity and frequency. The risk analysis techniques used herewith, are applied in a health service area as a case study, obtaining good general results, identifying the risk activities and risk types. Implementation and application of Safety System Engineering Techniques are highly versatile and capable of identifying the existing risks not only in industrial activities, but also in other segments, as is demonstrated in the present paper for the health service area. 1