OPINION

OPINION | EDITORIAL: Applaud hospital’s use of whole blood

Here’s a shout out to Jefferson Regional Medical Center. The hospital began using whole blood to treat trauma patients instead of just using the separate components of blood, making the hospital the first in the state to use the protocol.

Patients who received the whole blood, doctors said, had life-threatening bleeding.

“This represents the first use of whole blood in the state of Arkansas,” said Dr. Michelle Eckert, a general surgeon and medical director of the Jefferson Regional Level III Trauma Center. “The patients have recovered and are doing well.”

Using whole blood was the only way to do things back in the day. That, however, was before blood banks figured out that they could separate blood into individual components, thereby increasing the length of time the components could be used.

As the story in the Pine Bluff Commercial on Wednesday said, the use of whole blood fell by the wayside over the years. Until the Iraq war, that is. At that time, military doctors discovered that using whole blood was more beneficial to the wounded than the component parts.

“By using whole blood first, rather than components, the military had shown that deaths from bleeding were reduced,” said Dr. Charles Mabry, a general surgeon at the hospital and vice-chair of the Governor’s Trauma Advisory Committee for Arkansas.

“Using that information, our trauma team started making plans last year to use whole blood for emergency transfusion,” Mabry said.

And JRMC knows trauma, having dealt with 1,200 cases in two years, which works out to three cases every two days, including 107 that required blood transfusions.

Using whole blood is done in some other trauma centers, such as Mayo, according to the story, but this is a first for the state.

“With whole blood being available, we now have a powerful tool to help us save lives,” said Dr. J.R. Taylor, a critical care surgeon at the hospital.

That is great news for a couple of reasons. It’s excellent to know that if you are headed to JRMC with a serious injury and need blood, you could be a candidate for this new treatment. The other is the pride in knowing that our local hospital is working out there on the cutting edge, and sometimes that’s just using common sense. Hey, it’s working on the battlefield — and it used to be used all the time — let’s try it here.

High five, docs. We always knew we were in good hands at the hospital. This just reinforces it.

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