Evaluating health care policy decisions: Canadian blood services in Atlantic Canada

Abstract

In 2009, Canadian Blood Services, one of two nonprofit agencies that manage the supply of blood and blood products in Canada, announced plans to consolidate a number of its production facilities in an effort to standardize processes and workflows. One of the elements of the plan involved moving existing production facilities in Saint John, New Brunswick and Halifax, Nova Scotia, into a single facility to be located in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The plan drew criticism from some stakeholder groups. In this chapter, we describe how operations research techniques were used to analyze this difficult policy issue. We provide a discussion of the motivation for the study, an overview of the methodology, and the results of the studies conducted to evaluate the proposed change. The analysis involved a statistical comparison of transport modes as well as a series of simulation models to evaluate the impact of consolidation on product availability. The results of this analysis suggested that, on the balance of metrics considered, customer service would not be adversely affected by the consolidation of facilities.