From the Central Office
From congress to community: The lasting impact of the Harold Gunson Travel Fellowship
Erika Milena Granados Ferrer
The Harold Gunson Travel Fellowship enables transfusion professionals from around the world to participate in ISBT Congresses, share their work and connect with the international transfusion medicine community. But its impact does not end when the Congress closes. In this first-hand account, Harold Gunson Travel Fellowship recipient Erika Milena Granados Ferrer, from the Fundación Valle del Lili in Cali, Colombia, reflects on how the ideas and discussions from ISBT Kuala Lumpur travelled home with her — prompting conversations with colleagues and opening new possibilities for local transfusion practice.
From Kuala Lumpur to Cali: Bringing ISBT 2026 Learnings Home
Participating in the 39th International Congress of the ISBT in Kuala Lumpur through the Harold Gunson Travel Fellowship provided an opportunity to present the work developed at Fundación Valle del Lili while also gaining insight into the trends and challenges shaping transfusion medicine internationally.
Beyond the topics presented, one of the main lessons was recognising that innovation in transfusion medicine does not depend only on introducing new technologies or strategies, but also on strengthening our ability to anticipate risks, interpret data, and adapt knowledge to the needs of each context.
During the Congress, topics such as haemovigilance and risk management, Patient Blood Management (PBM), donor sustainability, precision transfusion medicine, artificial intelligence, and molecular biology raised relevant questions for our own practice. These topics were later revisited at Fundación Valle del Lili.
Bringing the knowledge home
After the Congress, we shared the main learnings with our colleagues and reflected on their potential application within our institutional context. The purpose was not to directly transfer practices observed in other settings, but rather to consider which of them could be relevant, feasible, and aligned with our needs and priorities.
As part of this process, we also revisited the work presented during ISBT 2026, in which we described our experience using a risk-based approach to support the safe implementation of new technologies in the blood bank. The discussion helped us identify opportunities for further development in areas such as haemovigilance, PBM, donor management, and precision transfusion medicine.
One of the areas identified was the possibility of progressively advancing the characterization of our donor population through red cell phenotyping. As a first step, phenotyping for the Rh and Kell systems was considered as a potential area for development. This initiative is still in the planning stage and will need to progress gradually, taking into account institutional priorities, operational feasibility, and patient needs.
In the future, having more comprehensive information about the red cell antigens present in our donor population could contribute to the development of strategies aimed at improving the availability of blood components with specific antigen profiles for patients with complex transfusion requirements.
Beyond knowledge transfer: adapting, questioning, and prioritizing
One of the most important lessons from this experience was understanding that international knowledge does not necessarily need to be transferred directly into local practice. Institutions differ in their resources, regulations, patient populations, technological capabilities, and priorities.
For this reason, the true value of participating in an international forum such as ISBT lies not only in learning about new practices, but also in returning home with new questions and critically examining them within our own reality. Some ideas may become concrete projects; others will require further evaluation and adaptation, or may simply remain opportunities for the future.
In this sense, the Harold Gunson Travel Fellowship allowed the learnings from ISBT 2026 to travel from Kuala Lumpur to Cali and extend beyond an individual experience, becoming conversations within our teams and opening new possibilities for the development of transfusion medicine at Fundación Valle del Lili.
The Congress ended in Kuala Lumpur, but the learning continued in Cali.
