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British Journal of Anaesthesia, 2002, Vol. 89, No. 2 214-216
© 2002 The Board of Management and Trustees of the British Journal of Anaesthesia

Editorial

Editorial II

Blood transfusion in surgical practice—matching supply to demand

J. C. Howie1 and P. J. Tansey1

1 Victoria Infirmary Glasgow G12 9TY UK

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

The paper by van Klei and colleagues,1 in this issue, demonstrates the ability of a simple algorithm to identify surgical patients, in whom it may be unnecessary to take blood for group and screen preoperatively. Any such predictive rule inevitably requires a trade off between sensitivity and specificity. The authors have identified a score, modified by preoperative haemoglobin, which allows a reduction of 35% in group and screen procedures.

Adoption of this approach has the capacity to reduce workload in transfusion laboratories. However, it does so at the expense of requiring, in this study, emergency crossmatching to be performed in 13% of patients. More significantly we may presume this to have been urgent in the 6% of patients in whom more than 2 . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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