Srinagar, Dec 13: The Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), Soura, has constituted a Hospital Transfusion Committee and tasked the roles to doctors as per the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) guidelines-2022.
As per the underlined roles and responsibilities in the directives, the HTC will ensure the governance of administrative issues related to transfusion, serve as the liaison with regulatory authorities, and reach consensus on submissions and inspection outcomes.
The 10-member committee would be headed by Medical Superintendent who has been designated as Chairman and Head Department of Blood Transfusion and Immunohematology as its Convenor.
It would be defining blood transfusion policies for the hospital commensurate with national guidelines and developing systems for their implementation.
The committee would be sharing transfusion-related information, including changes to national guidance, audit results and examples of good practice with users.
As per the directive, it would monitor implementation of national guidelines in the hospital and take appropriate action to overcome any hindrance in their effective implementation.
The committee would ensure appropriate blood utilization and best practice standards besides review and minimizing blood component lose due to time, expiry and wastage.
It would also develop a mechanism for safe collection and disposal of used empty blood/component bags and transfusion sets from clinical areas.
“Implement Patient Blood Management (PBM) initiatives, i.e. reviewing transfusion alternatives and making recommendations for their use. Reduce the number of inappropriate dose transfusion incidents,” the directive said.
It would also be introducing hospital-wide transfusion safety guidelines i.e. use of wristbands with barcodes etc.
“Empanel blood centres for supplying blood/blood components in hospitals without their own blood centres and in times of shortages in hospitals with their own blood centres,” it said.
The committee has been tasked to maintain adequate communication with blood/blood components, and providers to ensure the availability of required blood and blood components besides ensure training and proficiency evaluation for all healthcare personnel of the hospital involved in the blood transfusion process.
The committee, which would meet once in three months, would monitor, report and investigate adverse events and near misses related to transfusion and use these examples to improve learning.
“It would ensure a cycle of clinical audits to assess transfusion practice, safety and compliance with national requirements. To assess, if recall and other quality manual processes are working as they are intended to be,” it said.
Further, it would review quality indicators and transfusion service performance metrics, ensuring that all important indicators of relevance are included to improve the systems.
