Benchmarks for Transfusion Service Staffing

[MemphisLilli]

I'm looking for staffing benchmarks for the Transfusion Service. Does anyone have a source for this?

Thanks

Linda Liles MT(ASCP)SBB

Regional Medical Center at Memphis

MemphisTN

[Lcsmrz]

So much depends on your facility acuity level and the experience level of the techs that a staffing standard will be hard to find. At a small rural hospital, one tech can run the entire lab, whereas you may need several veteran techs in the blood bank at an AHC with a trauma center.

It would be better to poll similar facilties to yours for their staffing pattern.

[Geri Bollman]

Interesting. My lab director used those exact words, Staffing Benchmarks, yesterday. I did a search for staffing and hit this thread.

We transfuse 1500-2500 units a month, nearly doubled from 2000, including approximately 60-100 infant aliquots.

We are a trauma center, have over 800 deliveries a month, and have lots of oncology patients and ongoing 4-L plasmapheresis patients.

Our MT staffing has not really changed for over 15 years and most of us are getting old and cranky. We have a few young MTs, but are afraid that they will burn out. In the last year we have added a second lab asst on days and one on PM shift. We have 3-4 MTs on days, 2 on PMs and one on night shift. We have 4 full time BBers on day shift, and generalists filling in the rest of the day shifts and the PM and night shifts. We have one Provue and another on the way.

I oversee our BB, as well as 3 other hospital BBs, including the SOPs and QA. I bench quite a bit, am tasked with writing test plans to validate our new computer system, and cannot keep up, even though I work very long hours (salaried of course).

My hope is that lots of you will respond that you have 3 times as much staff for this amount of work! Administration always considers lab as stepchildren. We are suppose to suck it up and stop whining.

[tbostock]

Wow, Geri. At first glance, the "one night shift tech" jumps off the page for me. Being a trauma center, our rule was always that there always had to be two Blood Bankers on staff at all times in case of multiple trauma cases coming in. It doesn't appear that two evening shift techs are enough either. Most bad traumas tend to happen at night.

I vote that you start whining louder to get some help.

[Robert Fallis]

I have been asked for benchmarking data for productivity and as well as for other key areas. From my experience there is very little comparative data available for transfusion or blood bank services. We operate a 24/7 centralized pretransfusion and prenatal testing lab. In the absence of productivity data I have created my own. For a productivity benchmark we determine the number of procedures per FTE. The procedures we count are antibody screens plus blood components issued. We take the total procedures and divide by the number of paid FTE hours. We do this quarterly. We do not include FTE for Medical or Quality Management staff. For example in the first 3 quarters of this year we performed 168,288 procedures consuming 42.5 FTE. This gives us 3958 procedures per FTE. The target we wish to exceed is >3500 procedures per FTE (based on historical data). I also am looking for input on this topic and also any benchmarking data on safety, efficiency and employee engagement.

[Likewine99]

This is a tough one since there are so many variables to this question. I have monitored productivity on a daily basis in the past but luckily we looked at the overall lab rollup and not just BB specifically. BB is alwasy lower volume than Chem and Hem but higher in the "acuity" of what it takes to get the test out the door

In BB it's difficult to take a certain number of tests and divide it by the number of hours worked. Polling similar facilities is a great idea and consider the level of service your BB provides.

Regardless of what benchmarks you come up with you must always keep patient safety in mind. Sorry to be so vague but I don't think there is really one size that fits all re: BB staffing.

[rravkin@aol.com]

Robert,

I don't see in your post that ABO/Rh typing is counted as work per FTE. Your data would seem more complete if it were counted given that the ABO/Rh type is a routine part of a typical work-up. How is an ABO/Rh type discrepency resolve taken into account; not to mention positive ABSC's and other non-routine testing?

[Robert Fallis]

This is an internal benchmark used in our transfusion service business line with full knowledge of the staff's level of experience, motivation, and capabilities; the amount of labour-saving automation employed and the amount of complicated labour-intensive investigative testing performed. In our laboratories, a routine antibody screen includes an ABO/Rh type. If the patient has no historical blood group on file, we perform a second ABO/Rh test on the current sample submitted. We also realize that approximately 5% of the total samples we test require more extensive processing than an antibody screen and/or blood component issued. The count of antibody screens plus blood components issued was simply chosen for ease of counting and calculating the data. The weakness in using this calculation is that the bench mark will not detect a shift in any of the variables mentioned in the first sentence. It is impossible to precisely take into consideration all of these factors and arrive at a “scientifically determined” productivity or staffing target for a transfusion service. I use this bench mark data, along with error rate data and turnaround time data as a reference for making staffing decisions. In spite of these limitations, I believe the data is a useful reference point.

[ritaberry]

Linda,

Have you lived in Amarillo, TX? I used to work with a Linda Liles who was a BB'er.

Rita Berry