Scientific Journal of

  Abstract

 Background and Objectives

 Packed cells and blood products are requested according to the rate of bleeding in operations. Extra requests of blood cause extra payments. The average price of a blood unit was between 61,000 to 118,000 Rials in 2002 and the cost of a single cross-match in 2014 was about 85,000 Rials. This study evaluates the use of packed red blood cells and the wasted costs of unnecessary crossmatches.

 Materials and Methods

 This study was done retrospectively on the data collected monthly in four hospitals for three years. The information included units requested, units cross-matched, units transfused, units returned unutilized, and C/T ratio then, unnecessary crossmatch costs were calculated. For statistical analysis, IBM SPSS Statistics 21 was used.

 Results

 The total number of the requested blood units was 548568 out of which 35.7% were crossmatched 42% of all crossmatched were transfused and 68% returned. C/T ratio of the hospitals was 2.38, the proportion of transfusion to the number of beds was 16, and the total cost of unnecessary crossmatches was a billion Rials.

 Conclusions

 The findings show that unnecessary crossmatching costs can be minimized by providing training to ordering physicians to request blood according to MSBOS and use standard methods in blood grouping, antibody screening, and electronic crossmatch to save blood and time.