Blood Discard – Is Seroreactivity the Only Reason?

Background- Effective utilisation of available blood supply is the need of the hour. One important way for effective utilisation is to minimise discarding of blood components which will contribute to efficient management of blood inventory. Blood is discarded due to reasons like seroreactivity for viral markers HIV, HBV, HCV, detection of malarial parasite and VDRL reactivity, improperly managed blood inventory resulting in expiry of blood components and logistic difficulties in blood collection and processing. Materials and Methods- A retrospective study conducted to analyse the data of all the blood and blood components discarded over the last decade at the blood bank services of tertiary care hospital in South India. The details of blood discard were obtained from Blood Bank records Aim-Analysing blood discard rate and the reasons for discarding blood Results- The average number of donors in a year was 11648 in 11 years (2008-2018). The average number of components prepared in a year was 41,096. The reasons of blood products discard due to collection ranged from 5.1- 37%. Seroreactivity of the blood products ranged from 32.8% to 53% in which hepatitis B reactivity ranged from 12-38%. Processing causes accounted for 26.6% Conclusion-The review of blood discard rate and the reasons for blood discard is one of the important quality indicators in the blood bank. Careful supervision of the technical activities at all stages from donor selection with suitable veins, blood collection and component separation, appropriate storage as defined and testing with appropriate guidance will help to reduce wastage of blood components during collection and processin