The maintenance of blood Inventory involves several problems. The collection and storage of blood are required to be done by applying scientific methods for assuring its safety. It requires a planned procedure from the stage of collection of blood to the stage of its supply to the required ones. An adequate storage facility is necessary for its inventory. Raising the cost of acquiring blood and the donors becoming scarcer (substantial mismatches between supply and demand with little opportunity to adjust supply) it made sense to create the incentive plan. The United States is facing a large growth in demand for blood transfusions. Advances in healthcare and medicine are extending the average human lifespan through improvements in surgical procedures such as organ transplants.
However; these medical procedures often require blood transfusions. Improved hospital care is supporting a growing population of elderly people in the United States. These people are often no longer able to donate blood themselves and instead, the elderly population consumes a significant portion of the nation’s blood supply. This necessitates the implementation of a better inventory management procedure by ARC for the proper storage and supply of the available blood with it.
A team of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigators inspected the American National Red Cross (ARC), Biomedical Headquarters (BHQ), located in Virginia. During that inspection, the FDA investigators observed numerous deviations from FDA law and regulations. FDA notifies that ARC has violated the law. It had failed to thoroughly investigate suspected transfusion-transmitted disease cases. Its procedures are inadequate to conduct a thorough investigation of reports of suspected transfusion-transmitted diseases.
ARC wants to establish procedures that include a system by which the distribution of each unit of blood or blood component can be readily determined to facilitate recall if necessary and to investigate and correct continuing inventory management deviations. ARC failed to establish and implement procedures to ensure that blood products are labeled correctly. ARC also failed to investigate and correct deviations involving mislabeled blood products.
“ARC procedures fail to require regions to investigate and prevent recurrence of lost blood products unless their individual monthly rate of loss is equal to or greater than the upper control limit, established by ARC, or unless a region has a three consecutive month upward trend for rate of loss. ARC failed to ensure that inventory management procedures are adequate and are being followed in each region. BHQ did not assess deviations associated with inventory reconciliation of quarantine locations until this inspection.”