By Patricia Khoder
Blood is life. This truth becomes glaringly evident to anyone who visits the AUBMC Blood Bank. Situated on the third floor of the main building, the AUB Blood Bank is a laboratory unit within the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Like every unit within this prestigious university hospital, the Blood Bank stands as a beacon of excellence, leading the way with cutting-edge technology.
“Blood is crucial in healthcare; it is widely used in the management of patients care. It is essential for survival because it carries the oxygen to all body tissues and organs. So far, medicine has failed to find an alternative to blood in supporting the care given to patients," says Dr. Ghazi Zaatari, chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at AUBMC.
“So, we rely on blood donation. And, unlike many countries and big cities which usually have centralized transfusion centers to provide the blood needs of the local medical centers, in Lebanon, we have to be self-reliant since Lebanon lacks such centralized service. Plus, we, at AUBMC, have very specialized needs; AUBMC provides care to a sizeable population of cancer patients, both children and adults, specialized surgeries and trauma cases, be it victims of war tragedies and accidents who are frequently transported to AUBMC Emergency Room," he adds.
To meet these needs—around 1000 units of blood a month—, AUBMC and its blood bank count mainly on patients' families and friends donating blood at the medical center and on blood drives, where blood is collected onsite for a day from employees of a firm, institution, or places of public gathering such as large shopping malls.
To preserve its excellent service and ensure the safety of blood for treatment, AUBMC strictly applies at all times international standards and rules, in particular those of the College of American Pathologists (CAP). This policy has not changed despite the socio-economic crises that Lebanon has been enduring since 2019, which led, among other things, to a reduction in hospital and blood bank staff, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic that made it more difficult to collect blood and conduct drives.
“We follow the most important international standards; and in order to always ensure the best quality we always opt for the strictest standards," says Dr. Elizabeth Kfoury Baz, director of the Blood Bank, who leads a team of 18 staff members, namely 13 technologists and five phlebotomists. Technologists are those who perform bench work within the laboratory while phlebotomists are those who collect blood from donors.
When it comes to blood collection, AUBMC's blood bank relies on the medical history and interviews of donors and - undoubtedly- on blood tests. Plus, any blood that comes from outside AUBMC, even from another reliable establishment, is tested again for blood group and infectious agents.
In the blood bank, every single bag of blood is always tested, tagged, verified, and identified by two staff members. Two technologists, without exception, follow the procedure until blood is administrated to the patient. “There is zero tolerance for errors. We cannot afford a mistake and we never had an incident that had a dramatic or lethal outcome," says Dr. Zaatari.
The hospital, which has served the people of this nation and the region through the Lebanese Civil War and many other difficulties, has met the challenge of numerous emergencies. The most dramatic event was that of the Beirut Port explosion in August 2020. AUBMC received 450 casualties in the first few hours. This was overwhelming; injured victims piled up in the ER and waiting areas and many waited their turn on the sidewalks leading to the emergency entrance. In the first hours, the blood bank released 44 units to critical patients while, thanks to a spontaneous movement of donors, it received 200 units.
For Dr. Baz “donating blood is, above all, an act of altruism. A unit of blood, i.e. 450 cc, can be divided into red blood cells (RBC), plasma and platelets, and it goes to save lives in so many ways and for different groups of patients, be it cancer patients, bleeding patients, patients suffering from autoimmune diseases or having recently undergone grafts, or babies in their mothers' womb and others."
Dr. Zaatari and Dr. Baz will never say it enough: Blood is essential for optimal patient care and the blood bank relies on the donors' altruism to save lives.