Getting the right blood to the right patient: the contribution of near-miss event reporting and barrier analysis.

Safety and reliability in blood transfusion are not static, but are dynamic non-events. Since performance deviations continually occur in complex systems, their detection and correction must be accomplished over and over again. Non-conformance must be detected early enough to allow for recovery or mitigation. Near-miss events afford early detection of possible system weaknesses and provide an early chance at correction. National event reporting systems, both voluntary and involuntary, have begun to include near-miss reporting in their classification schemes, raising awareness for their detection. MERS-TM is a voluntary safety reporting initiative in transfusion. Currently 22 hospitals submit reports anonymously to a central database which supports analysis of a hospital's own data and that of an aggregate database. The system encourages reporting of near-miss events, where the patient is protected from receiving an unsuitable or incorrect blood component due to a planned or unplanned recovery step. MERS-TM data suggest approximately 90% of events are near-misses, with 10% caught after issue but before transfusion. Near-miss reporting may increase total reports ten-fold. The ratio of near-misses to events with harm is 339:1, consistent with other industries' ratio of 300:1, which has been proposed as a measure of reporting in event reporting systems. Use of a risk matrix and an event's relation to protective barriers allow prioritization of these events. Near-misses recovered by planned barriers occur ten times more frequently then unplanned recoveries. A bedside check of the patient's identity with that on the blood component is an essential, final barrier. How the typical two person check is performed, is critical. Even properly done, this check is ineffective against sampling and testing errors. Blood testing at bedside just prior to transfusion minimizes the risk of such upstream events. However, even with simple and well designed devices, training may be a critical issue. Sample errors account for more than half of reported events. The most dangerous miscollection is a blood sample passing acceptance with no previous patient results for comparison. Bar code labels or collection of a second sample may counter this upstream vulnerability. Further upstream barriers have been proposed to counter the precariousness of urgent blood sample collection in a changing unstable situation. One, a linking device, allows safer labeling of tubes away from the bedside, the second, a forcing function, prevents omission of critical patient identification steps. Errors in the blood bank itself account for 15% of errors with a high potential severity. In one such event, a component incorrectly issued, but safely detected prior to transfusion, focused attention on multitasking's contribution to laboratory error. In sum, use of near-miss information, by enhancing barriers supporting error prevention and mitigation, increases our capacity to get the right blood to the right patient.