ABO-incompatible transfusions can be life-threatening to patients and are often attributable to human errors. Wrong blood in tube (WBIT) errors lead to an ABO-incompatible transfusion about 1% of the time, and these errors are preventable. WBIT errors occur when the blood in the tube is not from the patient identified on the label or the tube is mislabeled. In order to determine if electronic scanning of barcodes on patient wristbands is more effective at preventing WBIT errors than manually checking the patient’s identification, researchers retrospectively compared pre-transfusion WBIT rates at 20 hospitals in 6 countries. After correcting for repeat samples and silent WBIT errors, the WBIT error rate was 1:3046 for the 16 hospitals (>1.6 million samples) using manual identification and 1:14,606 for the 4 hospitals (>0.5 million samples) using electronic identification (p<0.0001). Furthermore, 1 of every 28 samples with even minor mislabeling errors were found to have WBIT errors. Rejecting any sample with a mislabeling error and electronic scanning of patient wristbands are strategies to reduce the risk of ABO-incompatible transfusions.
