The process of giving blood, separating it into its vital components, and storing and shipping it are all processes that lend themselves to improvement through Lean and Six Sigma methodologies.
We’ll take a look at Lean and Six Sigma in transfusion services, blood bank management, and blood donor flow. Finally, we include a short video of interest on what happens to blood after a donation.
Lean and Six Sigma in Transfusion Services
In a short article from Omni Health titled, “The impact of implementing Lean and Six Sigma improvement models in Transfusion Services,” Rana Nabulsi outlines the benefits of applying Lean and Six Sigma in blood transfusion.
“The quality journey starts with the donation process, followed by the immediate storage of blood units, components preparation within six hours after collection, and accurate labeling for ABO and Rh grouping.”
“Implementing Six Sigma in Transfusion Medicine will help laboratory professionals reduce variation in processes and start counting their errors, defects, and deviations.”
“Implementing Lean is important to accelerate the process flow between different processes and reduce the wasted resources in process time, inventory, and defects.”
The author goes on to briefly mention the benefits of applying the Kanban model and 5S.
You can access the short article here.
Blood Bank Management Improvement: Serbia
In their paper “Planning the use of Lean Six Sigma as a framework for blood bank management improvements,” Radmila Jovanović and others discuss how Lean Six Sigma could be used in blood banks.
The authors describe the basic processes in the Blood Transfusion Institute of Vojvodina, Serbia and provide a framework for the application of the Lean Six Sigma approach in the Institute.
They provide the details for planned improvements in several of the key processes.
You can access their paper here.
Improving Blood Donor Flow: India
In an article titled “Evaluation of process excellence tools in improving donor flow management in a tertiary care hospital in South India,” Divya Venugopal and others detail the use of DMAIC and Lean to improve the management of blood donor flow.
The primary focus was the application of Lean Tools to improve the donor turnaround time. As a result, the donor wait time was reduced by 50%.
To see the details, access the article from this link.
Interesting Video on What Happens to your blood after donating
“What happens to your blood after you donate?”
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