The provision of blood for elective surgery.

The improvement in efficiency of blood use within a hospital is a major responsibility of the hospital blood bank. Such an improvement can be brought about by introducing a group and antibody screen system or by limiting the amount of blood routinely cross-matched for any procedure. Data to justify this can be best provided with the use of a blood bank microcomputer. Although autologous blood transfusion is the ideal it is difficult to implement in many situations and so homologous blood is used. The use of red cell concentrates in elective surgery has not been shown to be inferior to whole blood in most procedures.