Twenty-five million liters of blood into the sewer

Abstract

Laboratory medicine has evolved tremendously but not so much to the individual patient's benefit as far as the volume of blood samples is concerned. It can be calculated that with the current collection methods and the small amounts of blood or serum required by modern laboratory analyzers in the Western world alone each 25 million liter of patients' blood is thrown into waste containers. That is four times more than the total volume of blood that is transfused each year. And this is not a trivial issue, as studies show that many patients develop 'hospital acquired anemia' due to blood collection and this is associated with an adverse outcome. It is time that collection methods for blood samples are adapted to the much smaller volumes that are required by new generation laboratory analyzers, in particular for vulnerable groups, such as hematology or oncology patients, critically ill patients, or children.