Red blood cell transfusion practice in a single institution in Poland in 2018-2019 - Is there room for improvement?

INTRODUCTION: Red blood cell (RBC) transfusion (RBCT) is one of the most frequently performed procedures in inpatients within modern hospital systems. However transfusion practices may vary by an institution or even by a prescribing physician. In order to assess the current RBCT practice in our institution, we performed a detailed analysis of RBCTs. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We performed a retrospective analysis of all RBCTs in our institution between January 2018 and December 2019. The data collected included: age, sex, type of RBC, number of single and multiple unit RBCTs in bleeding and nonbleeding patients, number of multiple unit RBCTs in non-bleeding patients with and without hemoglobin (Hb) concentration determination after each RBC, primary indication for RBCT, pre-post RBCT Hb concentration in non-bleeding patients, lactate concentration pre-post RBCT in non-bleeding patients. RESULTS: The indications for RBCT were anemia (2244, 56.2 % RBC) and bleeding (1463, 36.6 % RBC). The most frequently used types of RBCs were RBCs without buffy coat (75.1 %) and leucodepleted RBCs (20.9 %). In non-bleeding patients 45.7 % were multiple unit RBCTs, only 3% were performed with Hb determination following the first unit of RBC, 508 (20.2 %) RBCT were performed with pre-post RBCT lactate concentration determination. CONCLUSIONS: Analysis of the local RBCT practice showed significant room for improvement. Areas of concern were type of RBC ordered, multiple unit transfusions in non-bleeding patients, lack of laboratory control of oxygenation pre-post transfusion or not taking it into account in RBCT decision making. Deficiencies are planned to be addressed by a comprehensive blood utilization review programme.

[Intravascular embolization of the uterine arteries in the treatment of early postpartum haemorrhage--case report]. / Wewnatrznaczyniowa embolizacja tetnic macicznych w leczeniu wczesnego krwotoku poporodowego--opis przypadku.

The article presents a case report of a patient with postpartum haemorrhage in the course of uterine atony with hypovolemic shock as a complication treated by uterine arteries embolization. In obstetrics and gynecology this procedure was first described in 1979 by Brown et al. Embolization is a rapid, secure, efficient and low-invasive alternative to surgical intervention when pharmacological treatment of postpartum haemorrhage fails.

Dataset of ontology competency questions to SPARQL-OWL queries translations.

This data article reports on a new set of 234 competency questions for ontology development and their formalisation into a set of 131 SPARQL-OWL queries. This is the largest set of competency questions with their linked queries to date, covering several ontologies of different type in different subject domains developed by different groups of question authors and ontology developers. The dataset is focused specifically on the ontology TBox (terminological part). The dataset may serve as a manually created gold standard for testing and benchmarking, research into competency questions and querying ontologies, and tool development. The data is available in Mendeley Data. Its analysis is presented in "Analysis of Ontology Competency Questions and their formalizations in SPARQL-OWL" [15].