SIOUX CITY | Mercy Medical Center -- Sioux City has stepped up efforts to conserve red blood cells.
All hospitals in the Trinity Health network have applied the new national recommendations developed by The Joint Commission and the American Medical Association -- convened Physician Consortium of Performance Improvement that advise adopting a "more restrictive" practice of red blood cell transfusion to produce better patient outcomes.
"We want to give just what is necessary, one unit at a time," said Dr. Gregg Galloway, a pathologist and vice chair of the Infectious Disease Committee at Mercy. "Give him a unit of blood. It will make him feel better -- that's the old paradigm. We don't believe it anymore."
Mercy has always had guidelines in place instructing staff when to give red blood cell transfusions, but Galloway said those rules have significantly changed and are "more restrictive" than they used to be.
"We're doing it because we do believe it is better quality patient care at all health care institutions and because of the cost of the resources," he said.
The new guidelines were released following a September 2012 national summit that convened representatives from 112 professional organizations and associations in effort to curb overuse of five medical treatments. Transfusion of red blood cells in hospitals was one of them.
A decade of studies, according to Galloway, found that when "more restrictive" red blood cell transfusion practices were used, hospitalized patients had lower mortality rates, fewer complications from infectious diseases, less breathing problems and cardiac events, as well as a reduced chance of developing acute respiratory distress syndrome -- a life-threatening lung condition that prevents enough oxygen from getting to the lungs and into the blood.
Galloway said hospital staff give patients red blood cell transfusions based on their hemoglobin (a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen) and hermatocrit values (percentage of red blood cells found in whole blood). When their hemoglobin value dropped below 10 grams per deciliter (G/dL), the patients received a transfusion. The "more restrictive" guidelines, he said, don't recommend transfusion until hemoglobin values fall between 7 and 8 G/dL.
"Big difference. You're going to use less red cell and units in the hospital," he said. "We predict that overall we'll have a 15 to 20 percent drop over the next year and a half to two years in our red cells that we'll use in our hospital setting."
Once blood is collected at a donation center, it's processed, placed in a refrigerator and stored. Chemical changes, he said, occur in the hemoglobin, and red blood cells lose their malleability.
"Those red blood cells start to change," he said. "They are no longer like the normal red blood cells you and I have floating around in our body. Banked blood is a tissue transplant. Those are somebody else's red cells."
In addition to the new guidelines, Galloway said, improvements in surgical techniques that reduce the need for red blood cell transfusions in the operating room are also contributing to the downward trend.
Surgeons are encouraged to salvage patients' blood in the operating room, a practice that was once reserved for open heart surgery. Now it's being used in trauma, abdominal aneurism and orthopedic surgeries.
"We're trying to save the patient's own blood. We re-process it in the OR and we give it back to them," Galloway said. "We also have new hemostatic medications that we can give patients that keep them from bleeding as much in OR."
Large hospitals, he said, now have blood management programs that staff nurses who review a patient's clinical situation alongside the guidelines. Some patients seeking elective surgery, he said, may have to wait longer to get into the operating room if they lack enough healthy red blood cells.
