Researchers: Svetlana Daichman¹, Oleg Pikovsky²

Background: Blood products are widely used in the modern medicine but may cause severe complications and result in increased expenditures for the health system. Various guidelines were proposed in order to reduce unnecessary blood transfusions. Unfortunately, the rate of adherence to the guidelines is low. Nowadays, the effort of healthcare policymakers is focused on transfusion policy optimization; however, the true level of adherence to the guidelines remains unclear. It’s unknown whether the improvement of proficiency with the guidelines would actually reduce the use of blood products.

Objectives: Evaluation of physicians' proficiency with the guidelines.
Assessment of the proficiency improvement on reduction of blood transfusions.

Method: Step one: Collecting data about blood products administration for a year prior to the intervention. Evaluation of physicians' proficiency with the guidelines by filling out a special questionnaire.
Step two: Intervention - improving physicians’ proficiency with the guidelines through structured workshops and lectures. Collecting data about blood products administration for a year after the intervention and comparing it with the data before the intervention. Statistically analysis of the collected data.

Findings: In total, 174 physicians from 4 hospital divisions (internal medicine, surgery, anesthesiology and gynecology) participated in the study. The average level of proficiency with blood administration guidelines among study participants was 6.48 ( ) of 10. Intervention to improve the proficiency reduced blood administration.

Conclusions: The study showed insufficient level of proficiency with blood transfusion guidelines among study participants. The study also demonstrated, that improvement of the physicians’ competence with the guidelines may reduce the number of blood transfusions.

Recommendations: Improvement of proficiency with transfusion guidelines may lower the number of blood transfusions, rate of complications and financial burden on the health care system. We recommend regular interventions in order to improve competence with transfusion guidelines.

Research end date: 11/2019