Academy
Blood safety & quality: Primer on patient blood management
Gopal Kumar Patidar
AIIMS, New Delhi, India
Hem Chandra Pandey
AIIMS, New Delhi, India
Rahul Chaurasia
AIIMS, New Delhi, India
The event was organized by the Department of Transfusion Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi on 24th of Feb 2024 at the NAMS auditorium with full support from ISBT. The program registered a total of 206 participants of which 90 attended the program physically. The program included both international and national speakers representing both the blood suppliers and blood users.
Inauguration of the event by lighting the lamp
The program was inaugurated by Krishan Kumar from the Directorate General of Health Services India, Shiv Choudhary, Head, CTVS AIIMS, New Delhi and Rattiram Sharma, Head, Transfusion medicine, PGI Chandigarh. They emphasized the importance of interaction among the blood bankers and clinicians and importance of the PBM program in patient care.
The first session saw Richard Gammon (One blood, Florida, USA) enlightening the audience to the basics of blood management through his experiences followed by an insightful lecture by Rajendra Chaudhary (SGPGIMS, Lucknow) on identifying the barriers to preoperative anaemia and iron deficiency screening and the strategies to overcome them. The session ended by a talk from Surya Dubey (AIIMS, New Delhi) highlighting the approach to screening the risk of blood loss in pre-operative period. All the talks were well appreciated by the delegates and resulted in fruitful discussion.
At the registration desk
The second session saw the application of the PBM principles in the intraoperative period through the experience of Mrityunjay and Piyush Ranjan both from AIIMS, New Delhi. While Mritunjay explained the tools used by the anaesthetists to limit the blood loss, Piyush beautifully presented the tools used by the surgeons in the intraoperative period. Both the tools are important to limit the blood loss and are an important pillar of the PBM program.
The third session then moved on to the role of point of care tests in the PBM program by Poonam Malhotra Kapoor (AIIMS, New Delhi) who presented practical examples of the application of POC tests in CTVS patients through her experience. This was followed by a beautiful debate on restrictive transfusion practices vs liberal transfusion practices. While Abhishek (JIPMER, Puducherry) representing the side of restrictive transfusions presented his side through the plethora of scientific evidence, Mukul (AIIMS, New Delhi) gave a rebuttal highlighting the limitation of the current evidence. The debate ended with the message that though restrictive transfusions are the norm, yet at time it is the patient clinical situation which warrants the threshold of transfusion.
The final session discussed the feasibility as well as challenges of implementing PBM in Obstetrics & Gynaecology as well as paediatric patient populations. The audience participated in most of the sessions and interaction among the speakers and the audience took the whole program to a new level. The program ended with thanks to the speakers, delegates and all those who worked hard to support the event. The program was well taken by the participants with more than 80% saying that it was informative and helpful to them in initiating the PBM activities.
Panelist, Left to right: Aparna Sharma, Meenu Bajpai, Richard R. Gammon, Vishesh Jain and Satyam Arora.
