PIMS-CORDS SFU Operations Research Seminar: Jas Dhahan

Blood is a crucial life-saving product in healthcare systems. Red blood cells are perishable, and managing these stocks in British Columbia and other regions of Canada, with remote / rural hospitals is challenging. Demand must be satisfied without wasting this resource. Group O negative red blood cells are a precious resource because they can be donated universally. O negative individuals comprise 6-7% of our general population, yet O negative demand exceeds 12% of transfusions. There is growing concern over the sustainability of the O negative supply. The appropriate management of even a single red blood cell unit has the potential to save a life.

There are seven health authorities in British Columbia with over 80 hospitals that manage their own blood inventory. British Columbia is a complex jurisdiction, which operates a provincial redistribution program, where red blood cells near expiry are sent from smaller to larger sites for use before expiring to minimize wastage.

In this talk, we discuss our ongoing collaboration with the Provincial Blood Coordination Office in British Columbia and Canadian Blood Services to inform red blood cell inventory management. We capture the key characteristics of a redistribution network of hospital blood banks using a stochastic queue network model. Our model is calibrated to and validated against real-world data from the Transparent Blood Inventory Database. This work is funded by NSERC and the Canadian Blood Services Blood Efficiency Accelerator Program.