COMMENTARY
Blood product transfusion guidelines
Correspondence to:
Professor Geoff Hughes, Emergency Department, Royal Adelaide Hospital, North Terrace, Adelaide 5000, Australia; cchdhb@yahoo.com
Accepted 4 January 2008
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
This month we publish a simple audit of Major Trauma Transfusion Guidelines from the Academic Department of Clinical Traumatology at Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, UK (see article on page 134).1 In summary, only 16% of 167 emergency departments seeing more than 50 000 patients a year use transfusion guidelines when managing major trauma. Although the audit specifically looks at trauma, the findings no doubt equally apply to non-trauma settings such as gastrointestinal, obstetric and gynaecological haemorrhage.
Blood products are a limited commodity and need to be used with careful clinical discrimination. Coupled with this is the fact that transfusing blood or any of its products into a patient is not always a benign procedure. The Transfusion Handbook of the UK Blood Transfusion and Tissue Transplantation Services2 has seven pages dedicated to the adverse effects of transfusion.
In addition, the management of major and massive haemorrhage, whatever the underlying
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
Relevant Article
- Assessing the potential for major trauma transfusion guidelines in the UK
- R W Westerman, K L Davey, K Porter
Emerg. Med. J. 2008 25: 134-135.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Submit a response
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when eLetters are posted
- Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
