Moving Toward Collecting High-Quality Umbilical Cord Blood: Application of Quality Control Circle

All umbilical cord blood (UCB) used for hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) must pass through a series of strict tests, including volume, total nucleated cell count, microbial contamination, hematopoietic stem cells content, and activity. A strictly standardizing collection procedures for UCB within hospitals is a critical step in preserving hematopoietic stem cells resources.

The study included a total of 560 participants, with 337 in the control group and 223 in the observation group, collected from January 2022 to December 2024. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups. The UCB collected from newborns before the initiation of Quality Control Circle (QCC) activities served as the control group, whereas those collected after the initiation of QCC activities formed the observation group. Through the establishment of QCC nursing management, the reasons for UCB storage failures within the department were analyzed, and corresponding countermeasures were formulated. Statistical analyses were performed to compare the reasons for failure of UCB storage, success rate, and quality indicators of successfully stored UCB between the two groups.

There were no statistically significant differences in the general clinical data of the newborns between the two groups. After the implementation of QCC activities, the rate of successfully stored UCB samples in the observation group was 90.6%, which was significantly higher than that of 84.3% in the control group (P=0.031). There were no statistically significant differences in the quality indicators of successfully stored UCB between the two groups.

The implementation of QCC in UCB collection increased the success rate by 6.3 percentage points without compromising cellular quality, supporting its application as a continuous improvement strategy in obstetric settings.