Blood Conservation Medicine

Phone: (602) 839-6070
Fax: (602) 839-4268
e-mail us

Blood Conservation Medicine at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center is dedicated to providing medical and surgical care while reducing or eliminating the need for blood transfusions. We’re responding to a growing number of patients who want alternatives to blood transfusion.

We assess a patient’s blood management needs and develop a plan of care using the latest drugs, technology and techniques to decrease blood loss and to enhance a patient’s own blood supply.

We also developed a Pre-Surgical Assessment Clinic to treat patients with preoperative anemia, who are more than three times likely to receive blood transfusion.

Reasons for Blood Conservation:

• Practical: Shortages in blood supply can lead to elective surgeries being postponed or cancelled.
• Healthier for patients: Blood loss and transfusions during surgery can weaken patients and make them more susceptible to allergic reactions and post-operative infections.

• “The right thing to do” : More than 75 Banner Good Samaritan physicians are committed to blood conservation because of health benefits to their patients and because it preserves a shrinking resource.

Blood Conservation Medicine's Three Guiding Principles:

• Build up patient’s own blood
  Restoring the patient’s blood count to normal before surgery is vital for best outcomes. Banner Good Samaritan’s Anemia Clinic gives patients intravenous iron and erythropoietin to enhance their patient’s ability to make red blood cells, thus turning the patient into their own blood bank.
• Reduce blood loss
  Conserving the patient’s own blood is achieved through:
  • Meticulous surgical technique.
  • Surgical devices that seal off bleeding vessels and promote clotting and coagulation.
  • Medications applied to tissue surfaces that control bleeding.
  • Limited blood sampling.
• Recycle patient’s own blood
  Use of blood conservation technology during surgery:
  • Cell-Saver technology can salvage, wash, and filter blood lost during surgery, and then return it to the patient.
  • Blood-dilution therapies expand the patient’s blood volume and minimize the loss of concentrated blood cells.

More information:

• Education programs to teach patients, nurses and physicians about the individual and community benefits of blood conservation
• Clinical consultations with patients and families
• Referrals to participating physicians
• Additional information on the Pre-Surgical Assessment Clinical sheet