With more than 28 million units of blood and blood products received by patients last year in the US, ensuring the safety and quality of blood and blood products is of paramount importance.
For blood service providers, then, maintaining and improving safety and quality is therefore vital in providing blood services, and in managing their quality management system (QMS), Anchorage-based Blood Bank of Alaska has chosen a solution from Scottish software developers Gael Ltd.
Meeting the blood needs of Alaska’s sick and injured, the Blood Bank provides 24-hour service to more than 20 hospitals over more than half-a-million square miles. With demand for the coming year projected at more than 25,000 units, the Blood Bank chose Q-Pulse as their QMS solution to ensure high levels of quality and safety ’from vein to vein’.
Statewide advances in medical and surgical care require us to keep pace with increasing demand for blood products, and to continue our initiative of increasing blood collections, we have to expand our services.
says Gaye Hurley, Quality Assurance Director at the Blood Bank.
With FDA oversight of blood centers and transfusion centers increasing, the Blood Bank had to make sure that the solution they chose complied with rigorous FDA and AABB industry standards, including 21 CFR parts 11, 210-211 and 600.
Q-Pulse can help blood service providers to comply with regulatory requirements as well as to identify opportunities for continual improvement, from tracking corrective and preventive actions to measuring the effectiveness of the QMS. Q-Pulse is used by US blood banks including Rhode Island Blood Bank and Heartland Blood Center.
Gaye says,
Q-Pulse provides us with a centralised system that offers point-of-need access to our QMS documents and records, including all of our SOPs, which will improve the accuracy of our records and the version control of our documents.
In addition, we’ll be increasing our use of Q-Pulse long-term to manage our internal and external audit, CA/PA, equipment calibration and training records.
Putting Q-Pulse in place to help manage our regulatory compliance will also help us to streamline our processes, as well as to reduce the duplication of effort by enabling us to integrate our compliance activities and actions.