American Red Cross’s Inventory Practices and Cost Reduction

The inventory system adopted by American Red Cross (ARC) has to be modified by the application of scientific methods from the stage of collection to its distribution. The collection of blood can be easily maintained by the adoption of elaborate propaganda activities for informing the people about the need for blood donation. Listing of volunteers for blood donation is arranged by a social organization like Rotary, Lions, YMCA, Junior Chambers, ARC should have a working arrangement with these organizations.

1. Demand patterns for various blood groups during the past 5 years can be a good indicator for the different blood groups to be stored. Adequate data should be maintained for this purpose and storage should be based on this data. In case of unexpected demand, a service/ social organization like Lions/Rotary can be contacted who will provide the necessary donors immediately on demand. “Establish a maximum surgical blood order schedule (MSBOS). An MSBOS is based on a hospital’s past surgical blood use and serves as a guideline for future surgical blood requests. Endorsement by a hospital’s transfusion committee, communication of the MSBOS guidelines to your hospital’s physicians and surgeons, and regular review of the MSBOS guidelines are critical to the success of an MSBOS.”
2. The practice of sterilizing the needles and using them, again and again, should be dispensed with. The usage of disposable needles should be encouraged. This can be a deterrent for transfusion inflectional diseases.
3. The medical check-up of the donors should be done more systematically to trace any chance of infectious diseases.
4. The labeling of the bottles for storing different blood groups should be checked to avoid the usage of different blood groups. A color scheme labeling for different blood groups can be adopted.

The current manual job of scanning individual bar codes on each bag of blood in sub-freezing temperatures could take hours with each bag going through a series of three steps before shipping. The trial showed that same process takes only an hour or less of time using the automated RFID system.