Challenges in Establishing a Transfusion Medicine Service: The Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi Experience

Opening a new hospital is a once in a lifetime experience and can be very inspiring for those involved in its activation. However, establishing a safe transfusion practice in a greenfield environment comes with unique challenges and opportunities.

To highlight critical activation components such as on-boarding of new personnel, establishing clinical practices, and integrating critical laboratory software.

Our staff initially faced challenges in standardizing transfusion medicine clinical practice inside the laboratory. Our efforts were mainly focused on the appropriate use of various transfusion orders, creating comprehensive policies for type and screening, cost effective utilization of blood products, and establishment of the maximum surgical blood order schedule. The transfusion service was launched with 2 information technology programs that separately facilitated steps in the transfusion process, but did not provide centralized access to the entire process. In these circumstances, we partnered with the laboratory information system team to create a series of interfaces that streamlined each system's functionality and implemented the existing infrastructure with upgrades that enable remote location and management of blood products.

The transfusion medicine team spent more than a year training and monitoring workflows to avoid individual variations between technologists and to adopt our own standards of practice. Participation in a structured training plan was also necessary between clinical caregivers to know the safe and efficient use of these standards.

Although laboratory and clinical staff are knowledgeable in care delivery, it is always a learning experience to establish a new system because of the natural tendency of resorting to previous practices and resistance to new approaches.