title: Quality indicators for Transfusion Medicine in Spain: a survey among hospital transfusion services.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Transfusion services in the European Union must implement quality management systems to improve quality. Quality indicators (QI) play a key role in quality management because they can supply important information about the performance of the transfusion service, which can then be used for benchmarking. However, little is known about the actual use of QI in hospitals. We tried to ascertain the use and characteristics of QI in Spanish hospital transfusion services.
  
  
  METHODS
  We performed a survey among transfusion services in order to learn which QI they use. We classified indicators into categories and concepts, according to the steps of the transfusion process or the activities the indicators referred to.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Seventy-six hospitals (17.9% of the hospitals actively transfusing in the country) reported 731 QI. Twenty-two of them (29%) were tertiary level hospitals. The number of indicators per hospital and by activity varied greatly. QI were assigned to some basic categories: transfusion process (23% of indicators), transfusion activity and stock management (22%), haemovigilance (20%), stem cell transplantation (9%), transfusion laboratory (9%), quality management system (8%), blood donation (3.4%), apheresis and therapeutic activities (2.5%) and immunohaematology of pregnancy (2%).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Although most hospitals use QI in their quality management system and share a core group of indicators, we found a great dispersion in the number and characteristics of the indicators used. The use of a commonly agreed set of QI could be an aid to benchmarking among hospitals and to improving the transfusion process.
authors.affiliation: Transfusion Service, University Hospital "Marqués de Valdecilla", IDIVAL, Santander, Spain.
authors.forename: Iñigo
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Romon
authors.affiliation: Department of Haemotherapy and Haemostasis, Biomedical Diagnostic Centre, University Clinic Hospital, IDIBAPS, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Miguel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lozano
mesh_terms: D001782:Blood Donors; D001803:Blood Transfusion / Q000379:methods*; D006761:Hospitals; D006801:Humans; D011786:Quality Control; D013030:Spain; D064826:Transfusion Medicine / Q000379:methods