Mining the online resources

Navigating some publication search tools can be daunting. Fortunately, there are some great online transfusion medicine resources on Canadian Blood Services websites.

Blood utilization best practices

Our Utilization team has conducted two best practices surveys to date, and have shared the findings in customer letters that are posted online. The first two topics were O Rh negatives red blood cell utilization and platelet utilization and inventory management. With the first survey the goal was to keep the O Rh negative BloodBrief topic fresh in everyone’s mind, and to share “best practice” utilization and inventory management ideas collected from your hospital peers.

In addition to the customer letters, we are disseminating these best practices via our education website where you can find the same content in a more digestible and searchable format.

More best practice surveys are in the works, including topics like irradiation and group AB cryoprecipitate.

Clinical Guide to Transfusion

Another well referenced resource is the online Canadian Blood Services’ Clinical Guide to Transfusion. This guide is an educational resource for health care workers on the provision of blood products and transfusion medicine services in Canada. We regularly reach out to Canadian experts to write and review the 18 chapters so that it continues to provide users with the most up to date information. Topics include blood administration, adverse reactions, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, and platelet transfusions and management of refractoriness.

In a survey conducted in 2015, participants reported significant knowledge gain from reading the chapters. With the launch of our new education website last autumn, the Clinical Guide is now available as html content in addition to the PDF downloadable format. It is easy to search, view on mobile devices or print. In fact, the Clinical Guide is our most frequently visited resource, representing 14 of the top 25 most visited web pages.

Publications

While our research and education network members tend to publish most of their work in peer-reviewed journals (sign-up for our Research & Education newsletter  to get a monthly update), they also publish original publications on the website. One that garners the most interest is an article on TRALI, which has a whopping 4000 to 5000 unique page views monthly (with an average of six minutes spent on the page for each visit). This publication has been recently updated, so take a few minutes to check it out!