AM25-TU-02-L - The Specialization of Hospital Transfusion Committees: Pragmatic Approaches to Increasing Interest and Effectiveness

Hospital Transfusion Committees (HTC) attempt to provide a peer-to-peer review of a variety of transfusion-related activities. While they are not strictly required, their structure is used for efficiency in fulfilling the review of safety issues, utilization of blood products, transfusion reactions, and logistics of blood product availability (turnaround, etc). Most hospitals have used a single HTC in the past, though more recently, a separate patient blood management committee has been described alongside a main HTC. In a single-center experience in a tertiary regional hospital, at least two distinct committees were formed to be more efficient: a Transfusion Safety Committee (nursing, quality, administration, blood bank, transport, etc) and a Utilization/Education Committee (residents and fellows). The Transfusion Safety Committee developed into a very robust, self-directed force led by nursing and quality leadership with executive sponsorship. The individuals who were identified as key for these roles began with the executive sponsor (CMO of Patient Outcomes) and the Director of Quality. With these two individuals energized with their roles and understanding of transfusion safety, they then selected several key quality and nursing leaders who either had extensive institutional knowledge or had were in a position to benefit from the leadership opportunity of learning and applying transfusion safety principles. Multiple variables were assessed to understand how the committee involvement would develop their experience, as well as contribute to the new team. The Utilization/Education committee became a novel arena for ordering providers (residents and fellows) to rapidly understand blood management and increasing their personal transfusion knowledge to effect change to their respective specialties. The question of how and who to engage for this committee was originally a trial-and-error task by the Transfusion medicine physician: presenting at as many resident teaching days as possible, Grand Rounds, and asking for ACGME support to provider hospital wide emails announcing the start of this committee. Clearly, this committee would need incentives and these were clarified as 1) educational opportunities as micro sessions and 2) CV lines items such as committee involvement and posters.