Improving emergency department blood product use through nursing education.

Background: Rapid access to blood products can be lifesaving for hemorrhaging patients, but placing blood components in easily accessible locations in the emergency department (ED) can lead to wasteful patterns of use. Education can lead to improvements in transfusion behavior, but such changes for the better are often short lived.

Methods: To facilitate the early initiation of balanced resuscitation, an emergency blood refrigerator was placed in our ED in February 2015.

Blood School.

Objectives: To describe and evaluate a laboratory-based nursing education activity on transfusion to improve patient safety, an often-neglected opportunity.

Methods: Our transfusion service developed a day-long "Blood School" to provide knowledge, skills, and behaviors to nurses in four aspects of transfusion: blood ordering, sample collection, transfusion procedures, and recognition and reporting of transfusion reactions. We collected survey data on methods and effects of training and hard data on the number of reported patient safety events.