Study of reasons for discarding whole blood and its components in a blood bank in a rural tertiary care teaching hospital in Maharashtra

Abstract Introduction: Each unit of blood is valuable; thus, it must be used as efficiently as possible with the least amount of waste. Supply of blood in an emergency requires stringent storage conditions with quality checked and should be available at the time of demand to the needy. So blood banks play a vital role in this demand-supply process. On the other hand, because of the biological nature of blood, it is very vulnerable to contamination by infections, early expiry and hemolysis. The purpose of this study was to determine the reasons for the wastage of blood and blood components. Materials and Methods : At our tertiary care teaching hospital blood bank we conducted a retrospective analysis of data of all whole blood and blood component samples collected from January 2013 to December 2020. Results: 391 (9%) of the 4022 entire blood bags collected were discarded 132 (32%) of them were eliminated due to hemolysis and lipolysis and the same 32% expired due to completion of the life span of RBC. Sero-reactivity for TTI or transfusion-transmitted diseases was 22.4% and only 13% were rejected for use because of some leakage or inadequate quantity of blood in the bag. Conclusion: An adequately conducted donor screening, notification and counseling of permanently deferred donors will help in discarding less number of bags that are positive for different TTI. Properly implemented blood transfusion policies will help to utilize the blood components in a proper way resulting in discarding the number of blood bags due to expiry.