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For patients who have cardiac surgery, the risk of severe blood loss is high if they have a condition called acquired hypofibrinogenemia — this means they have an undersupply of an essential blood clotting protein called fibrinogen. Doctors aim to minimize their bleeding with a fibrinogen replacement product, either cryoprecipitate or fibrinogen concentrate, to restore clotting factors to normal levels. A recent study that compared both products could have an impact on how cardiac patients are treated in Canada.

Congratulations to Dr. Aditi Khandelwal, winner of the 2019-2020 Lay Science Writing Competition. Today’s post features her heartfelt winning entry.

Do you know of an individual whose contributions might be worthy of the Canadian Blood Services Lifetime Achievement Award? To receive this honour, a nominee’s landmark contributions must be recognized as both extraordinary and world class in the field of transfusion or transplantation medicine, stem cell or cord blood research in Canada and/or abroad. Nominations are open until May 19, 2020.

Although it doesn’t happen often, sometimes patients will have a bad reaction during or after a blood transfusion. Surveillance systems set up to monitor the safety of the blood supply in Canada keep track of incidents like these so that issues potentially affecting patient safety can be identified. A recently published guide on reporting adverse transfusion events, available on Canadian Blood Services’ professional education website, helps make the reporting process easier to understand.