benchmarks

[umeshkumar]

Hi

Can someone provide the international bench marks for

1. PRBC wastage rates

2. expired PRBC rates

Our expired PRBC rates are around 7% and we'd like to improve.

thanks

[tbostock]

I'm not sure that these benchmarks exist. 7% does seem a little high to me; our goal here is less than 3% for last year we had less than 1%. However some things can factor in such as...size of hospital, distance from blood supplier, usage rates, etc. Take a look at your inventory management and see if it is a particular type that you are expiring.

We print a daily report of units expiring in the next 7 days and post it on our refrig. If we have any units less than 2 days, we communicate it to the next shift to try to use it (for example, "B Neg unit expiring, please use for any B patient).

[Dr. Pepper]

Hi

Our expired PRBC rates are around 7% and we'd like to improve.

thanks

That IS high. If you went through 5000 units a year, that represents over $78,000 at our prices. Do you draw your own donors, or have no outlet for excess inventory?

We print a report like Terry. We can't send stuff back for credit if it has 14 or less days on it. So we try to move excess inventory back, particularly Bs and ABs, before then. Best is to not have excess in the first place. We've found it helps to get smaller deliveries stretched out over time (our blood supplier lives right around the corner) rather than big shipments which give you a whole bunch of units which all outdate at the same time. Maintaining a little smaller inventory can help, too, if supply time is short. For me, I can get 6+ extra shipments for the price of one RBC. We will tag shortdated units for reserve for definite transfusions (as opposed to preops).

Edited January 28, 2013 by Dr. Pepper

[Eagle Eye]

Same here. Our deliveries are stretched out during week (almost everyday).

7% is definetly high. We are at 0.3% for total wastage (including expired units and wasted units by the floors). Most of our wastage is not due to outdates (we expired 1 or 2 units in last two years).

[Eoin]

I personnaly haven't come across any benchmarking in this area, but it should be driven by cost considerations. Like Dr Pepper, we are lucky we are near one of our suppliers and can ship back units with 10+ days life on them. They are a big hospital and can use shorter dated stock (we are smaller). We try to keep a small inventory and look at the list every day to manage closely. Our wastage was 0.2% for 2012. (Has been consistently coming down over the years with closer management). The savings are worth the effort.

Good luck with it. It is a very importmant management requirement.

Cheers

Eoin

[AMcCord]

We are in a rural area. Our supplier is almost 3 hours away and we get a big load of product once a week with the opportnity to fill in our supply during the week, if needed. Because we are one of the bigger blood users in our supplier's region, we also have a special arrangement with them. We take shorter dated units on a regular basis and keep some units (AB pos and AB neg mostly) until outdate (and receive credit for them), depending on the blood center's stock levels at the time.

Our outdate rate runs 2-3%, though we are always trying to cut that down. If you remove the AB pos and AB neg units which our supplier leaves with us until outdated, our waste rate is 1.5% or less. We try very hard to keep our O pos and O neg outdates to zero. Our waste numbers due to destruction of units are low - we lost 3 units of red cells out of 1,306 last year bacause of errors/mishaps on the nursing units (a number that is too high in my book) and none in 2012 and 2011 - because we work very closely with nursing management to control how blood products are handled.

Your outdate rate is probably a bit high, but I'll bet you can bring it down with careful management. We have made big improvements over the last 15 years by following the same sort of plan that Terri and Phil posted. If you can't rotate stock back to a blood supplier, that will probably increase your outdate rate, so the best bit of advice then is to keep a very close eye on units with outdates 7 days or less and make sure that your staff is using them for your transfuse orders. Good luck!