Dear Sir,
Recently Maria de Fátima Alves Fernandes and her colleagues reported some results and perspectives about haemovigilance in Brazil1, so here we want to present our haemovigilance findings in a regional hospital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Haemovigilance systems started to be established in 1992 in Japan2 and then in France (1994)3, Germany (1994), Greece (1995), Luxembourg and the United Kingdom (1996)4. The principle aims of haemovigilance programmes are to detect and analyse untoward effects of blood transfusion in order to correct their causes and to prevent recurrence and, thereby, safeguard patients' safety. There are differences in reporting between haemovigilance systems. United Kingdom and Ireland operate with voluntary reporting of serious and incompatible blood component transfusion reactions while in the Netherlands and Québec all reactions are reported on a voluntary basis. In France the system involves mandatory reporting of all reactions5. A national haemovigilance system was officially implemented in Brazil in 2002 starting with a network of 100 tertiary hospitals with voluntary reporting of all reactions. In 2009 the reported rate of reactions was 0.91/1,000 transfusions1.
Information on reporting of transfusion reactions in non-tertiary hospitals outside this network in Brazil has not been published so far. Our aim is to present the reporting of transfusion reactions in a regional hospital of the Southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. During a 5-year period (2006–2010) 28 reactions were reported in 10,790 transfusions (2.6/1,000).
The transfusion reactions were identified by nurses who first contacted the physician to decide how to manage the reaction and then subsequently made a written report to the blood bank, notifying the name of the patient, the characteristics of the reaction and its severity. The majority of the transfused patients had chronic benign diseases, cancer, previous accidents or were waiting for or recovering from surgery. Later the reported reactions were classified as febrile, allergic, haemolytic and both febrile and allergic. No severe reaction was observed. The reactions were of a febrile type in 17 cases, allergic in seven cases, haemolytic in one case and had both febrile and allergic features in one other case; in two reports no information was given about the type of reaction. The observed reporting of reactions (2.6/1,000 transfused units) did not differ much from that in France (2.83/1,000 units) and the Netherlands (2.9/1,000 units)5.
Footnotes
The Authors declare no conflicts of interest.
References
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