Website spotlight: Making patients safer in the OR: One hospital revamps its blood availability process
Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, July 8, 2011
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A pediatric patient at Shands Healthcare at the University of Florida, Gainesville made it to the operating room (OR) for a surgery likely to require blood, but upon arrival, no blood or active blood type and screen was available.
That's when Stephen Lucas, MD, division chief of the Division of Regional Anesthesiology and Preoperative Pain Medicine at the University of Florida and medical director of the ORs at Shands, decided to investigate the process of getting blood to ORs.
Lucas knew the 850-bed hospital needed a new process to put an end to incidents like this. "Our ultimate goal in the beginning was to ensure no patient ever entered an operating room for elected surgery who might need blood products that we had not arranged, and that we'd have those products available immediately," he says. "We wanted to promptly obtain blood in the OR for all elective cases where it might be needed."
The new blood stop check process has been in place for more than a year now, during which time there has not been a situation in which blood is unavailable for an elective surgery patient.
Editor's note: To read the rest of this free article, visit the Reading Room, part of www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com.
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