Academy
The Missing Link In Blood Transfusion Services: Introducing Transfusion Practitioners Workshop
Lyonga Kharim Charles
Blood Track, Cameroon
Fonkou Steve
Transfusion Medicine Specialist, Cameroon
Cameroon faces a serious challenge of absence of adequately trained or up-to-date trained transfusion practitioners in her healthcare system. While a few have been trained in spotty time distributions over the years, many facilities are left with inadequate knowledge on the tasks and impact of the transfusion practitioner in the blood transfusion chain. Health Education and Research Organization (HERO) Cameroon, leveraged her transfusion medicine specialist to improve on the Blood Transufsion Services in Cameroon in her own way. From the successfully organised workshop on Optimizing Blood safety in Cameroon done in 2024, through that on strengthening Hospital Transfusion committees in 2025, HERO Cameroon thought it fitting to hem in this workshop on addressing what was termed, the missing link in the blood transfusion services; introducing the transfusion practitioner (TP). To address a variety of healthcare professionals in this domain, the target audience was defined to include hospital administrators, physicians, nurse practitioners and blood bank scientists.
In order to close the circle for it to hold up then, this missing link was tackled in a two-day workshop organised as part of the 2026 ISBT academy events, converging fifty-five participants from six of the ten regions of Cameroon. They came from fourteen hospitals, one blood donation organisation, and representatives of the National Blood Transfusion Service (NBTS). The participants included healthcare students (medicine, medical laboratory Sciences), nurses (transfusion practitioners and anaesthetists), general practitioners, internists, medical laboratory scientists, and members of voluntary blood donors’ organisations. This event was organised as a hybrid workshop (face to face for participants and home based facilitators, and online for the international trainers) by HERO Cameroon. The workshop was hosted by the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services (CBCHS) at the Resource centre for excellence in Yaoundé, and chaperoned by the NBTS on March 12th and 13th 2026.
Keynote addresses by the chairs, Mbanya Dora- General Manager and Tayou Claude- Medical & Technical Director of NBTS Cameroon
Group work activity
The workshop had two modules with distinct themes running from 7:30 am to 5 pm each day, and a corresponding chairperson for each day. A plenary a day comprised four to six presentations, ice breaking sessions, a one-hour virtual Q&A session, and groupwork activity in five groups in the morning-afternoon sessions. The afternoon-evening sessions involved group work exercises, open discussions and clinical case presentations on hemovigilance (donor and patient). A particular portion of the day was reserved for three hospitals from 3 different regions of the country to share their experience and lessons learnt on “challenges of blood safety: donor recruitment”. This served as great encouragement and gave room for questioning their practices in a bid to enhance best practices of TPs in the settings so trained. There was a pre and post-test survey for the two days, and feedback via Google forms. At the end of the training, a post training engagement form was filled by the participants indicating how they aimed to apply and use the knowledge gained. This was done to ensure proper post-seminar follow-up.
Day one, set out to lay the foundation of safe blood transfusion practices and was chaired by the current and pioneer general manager of the NBTS — Mbanya Dora. This day aimed to equip and empower participants on the relevance and role of Transfusion Practitioners (TP). The keynote speech from Mbanya Dora followed the welcome speech from the representative of the Director of Health Services of the CBCHS, Mr ANOLD FUH. Both messages highlighted the crucial stakes at hand and timeliness of such a session. Furthermore, the participants were exhorted to immediately advocate for the best practices in their settings, and continuous medical education for a sustained vision of TPs in Cameroon. Our three-fold specific goals were to Understand the strategic plan of the National Blood Transfusion Service in Cameroon, to get clarity on the role of transfusion practitioners and to gain knowledge and competence in donor selection and donor vigilance. These were elegantly unpacked by M. Dora (Cameroon-NBTS), Niyibizi Roland (WHO AFRO), Rachel Moss (UK), Abiy Belay (WHO Ethiopia), and Sulem Ingrid (Yaounde University Teaching Hospital).
Mbanya spelled out the strategic plan of the NBTS from 2026-2030, giving participants key points on the role of the healthcare professionals generally, and the transfusion practititioners specifically. She anchored the vision in a continuation of the previously set vision, stating the strong points and achille’s heel of the former. Rachel Moss dived into the crux of the matter, tackling Transfusion Practitioners as the missing link in blood transfusion services. Participants gained valuable insights on their roles and links to training nurses in transfusion medicine, podcasts that could serve in frequently engaging transfusion best practices across the globe just to name a few. Skills were further honed on donor selection and its importance in blood safety. This was done by Abiy from Ethiopia, and the icing on the cake was served by Sulem Ingrid who hemmed in the lessons on donor vigilance, addressing the why, the how and the what in Africa and Cameroon. The group exercises were geared towards pushing participants to build a case for transfusion practitioners that would be presented to authorities as they return to their settings. The cases they’d maked were to be practical, realistic and implementable solutions. Participants utilized knowledge from the plenary, and other critical thinking skills to identify factors that will support successful introduction of the TP role in Cameroon, where they came up with the top 5 enablers and briefly explained how those could be leveraged. They also identified barriers that could prevent implementation and proposed practical solutions. Here, top 5 barriers and their mitigation strategies were succinctly presented and discussed. Furthermore, participants developed a realistic, phased implementation plan with clear timelines and milestones. They defined measurable indicators to track implementation success. These KPIs were presented on a dashboard table and discussed, scrutinizing the explicitly framed nature of their definitions, targets, and frequency of measurement. To crown these, participants built up persuasive arguments to convince hospital leadership on the need for TPs via a peer assessed 5 minute executive mini pitch-aton.
Family picture with chair, facilitators and participants
Members of the organizing committee: From left to right: Lyonga Kharim, Tohson Falake, Shakngang Soring, Ngum Frida, Fonkou Steve, Ajamah Rubie, Njang Emmanuel, Mbuye Gilbert, Nyah Instin, Buinda Alban, Herbert-Kelly N.
“Building Systems for Sustainability and Responsiveness” overarched the second day, chaired by Prof Tayou Claude. This second day of the workshop drew the lines in the sand on equipping participants with relevant skills designing relevant educational programs, understanding hemovigilance and patient blood management (PBM) and how to implement these, recognize the importance of good data collection and how to use data in the blood tansfusion service, and finally, to gain abilities in designing and implementing audits for blood transfusion services. Prof Tayou exhorted participants to develop a keen interest in the goals mentioned, while hemming in the shared objective of every stakeholder being the safety of the patient. Participants then learned from the plenaries, on how to make work data driven quality improvements in BTS (Erica Wood) , were educated on the 4R’s of active hemovigilance (Gopal Patidar). Further the role of TP in implementing PBM was presented by Thabiso Rapodile from SANBS. They also dwelt on the art of developing and implementing relevant educational programs in transfusion (Richard Gammon) and refined their skills on how to design and implement internal audits for blood transfusion services in Cameroon (Claude Tayou-NBTS Cameroon).
The group work on this day involced problem solving presented as 7 clinical cases pertaining to hemovigilance and PBM were discussed. The Q&A session was enriching with live interaction between the international presenters and the audience particularly with sharing experience and knowledge transfer. These cases engaged the groups in appropriate decision making incorporating medical, ethical and administrative cautions. This holistic approach led to rich discussions and debates on best practices, decisions and policies to be adopted in the various settings. The day objective of sustainability was crowned by a presentation by Fonkou Steve in his power of consistency case study of the CBCHS wheresome marked out work has been done over the years and could serve as contextual template to foster the overall introduction of TPs in the nation. Questions were asked in order to understand his model, so as to better advocate in other settings.
The closing rite was marked by speeches and call to action via the signing of the post training engagement documents. Overall the participants were extremely satisfied. The organising team and participants expressed gratitude to the ISBT for sponsoring this academy event and ccontributing to the growth of transfusion medicine and overall health in Cameroon. Here you can find a short video on the highlights for the ISBT Academy event in Cameroon
