[Establishing bone bank at Varazdin General Hospital]

Bone bank has to supply patients of our Department of Orthopedics and patients from Department of Traumatology with necessary bone grafts.

The paper describes in detail the establishment of Bone bank at Varazdin General Hospital.

At Varazdin General Hospital, Department of Transfusion Medicine, in cooperation with Department of Surgery and Department of Orthopedics has been working on developing tissue banking for already 10 years. Primarily, surgical bone remnants and femoral bone heads are collected from live donors and then transplanted. Since 2004, bone tissue has also been collected by means of explantation and then transplanted. In 2004 and 2005, as many as 170 packages of bone tissue were collected at our institution, 40 of which were with spongiosa collected through explantation, and 130 bone remnants. As many as 61 bone remnants and 21 spongiosa were transplanted. Contamination rate of bone grafts was 15.8%. All contamination allografts were destroyed. Bone grafts were used for revision hip arthroplasty, corrective osteotomy and spondylodesis. In the last two years, we have developed a computer program for Bone Bank managing, and have improved our Quality Management System.

Bone Bank is a service that retrieves, tests, stores and distributes bone grafts and allows a secure system for supplying surgeons and their patients with necessary bone grafts.