Knowledge and awareness among nurses regarding the blood transfusion services and practices in a tertiary care teaching hospital.

Sir,

The cumulative analysis of the United Kingdom (UK) Serious Hazards of Transfusion (SHOT) report reveals that overall the most common adverse incidents are caused by errors, resulting in the transfusion of an incorrect component or one that does not meet the specific requirements of the patient.[1] Nurses play a significant role in correct, scientific, and safe usage of blood and its components and if they can do it correctly, the probability of incidence of blood transfusion risks will be reduced to a minimum.[2]

We performed a cross sectional study at our tertiary care teaching hospital to determine the knowledge and awareness level of nurses regarding blood transfusion services and practices using a questionnaire containing 20 multiple-choice questions and recorded the correct responses. We randomly selected 100 nurses (50 Grade-I and 50 Grade-II nurses) from medical and surgical wards, intensive care units (ICUs), operation theatres, and Emergency areas of the hospital. In our setup, the Grade-I nurses who are senior to the Grade-II nurses, perform bedside patient care activities as well as administrative tasks. The questionnaire used was designed after referring to a study by Mitra et al.[3] and was divided into five categories [Table 1]. The knowledge and awareness of the nurses was not compared area wise in the study. The statistical analysis was done using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (version 15.0, Chicago, USA).

Table 1

Response outcome of the questionnaire (n = 20) among nurses

The correct response rates [Tables 1 and 2] of “Awareness related” questions were highest among both Grade-I (70%) and Grade-II (70.7%) nurses. The overall mean correct response rate for all the 20 questions taken together was 60.7% [Table 2]. No statistically significant difference in correct response rate was observed in all the question categories [Table 2] except for the “storage related” question category (P = 0.013) among Grade-I and Grade-II nurses.

Table 2

Question categories and percentage (%) of “correct” response by nurses

Aslani et al.,[4] in their study, showed that 18.8% of nurses gave a correct response for “optimum time between the issue of blood/blood components and their transfusion” that is similar to our study (19%). Bayraktar et al.[5] measured the nurses' knowledge and practice related to blood transfusions where only a few had scores higher than 50 out of 100. The statistically significant correct responses by Grade-II nurses rather than the Grade-I nurses for “storage related” questions probably reflects that the Grade-II nurses are more involved in handling the blood components for bedside transfusions. We suggest that on-the-job training and education sessions focused toward pretransfusion checks and bedside practices may help further improving the nurses' knowledge.

Financial support and sponsorship

Nil.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest.