Hemolysis is the breakdown of red blood cells. It has a major impact on patient safety as the need for a replacement specimen increases the risk of injury and infection. Your detection and reporting can facilitate the generation of benchmark data used to develop quality practices to monitor and reduce this leading cause in blood transfusion. The Medicine Transfusional Service-MTS IPOC have current methods of hemolysis detection according to European Council Guidelines. We consider very important for the maintenance our quality in transfusion, like a Certification ISO9001.

This work show our procedures and results to evaluation of blood hemolysis in erythrocytes concentrates(CEs) around 1 year.

Our CE are provided of Institute Portuguese of Blood and Transplantation (IPST). European Council consider that 0.8% the maximum value for stored CE at last expire data. We determine hemolysis twice time in 4 CE stored/month, 2 CE with ±10 days and 2 CEs ±30 days in our quality control. Free hemoglobin is measure with Hemocue and The value of Hb (g/dL) and Htc (%) are performed by hematology accounty. When de values are checked is calculated the percentage (%) of hemolysis. We used statistic t test 95% IC (0.005–2.0) to see the differences between Htc, Hb and hemolysis at harvest and stay on bank CEs time.

Our CE stay on bank 11 days ±9.2 the total variance of Hb total is 18.05 ± 2.01 and Htc is 59.17 ± 6.02, and have a difference in the hemolysis 0.46 (t test 95% IC)when observed the stay on time in our bank and have  0.05(t test 95% IC) when observed shorted stay (1 day) versus long stay (above 20 days) .This difference in these CEs, probably,have relation with harvest time and manipulation, but never passed 0.8% and we haven't transfusion reactions in the last year. We believe that hemovigilance procedures keep good CEs until your expire data.