• C L Turner, A C Casbard, and M F Murphy.
• National Blood Service, Oxford, UK.
• Transfusion. 2003 Sep 1;43(9):1200-9.

BackgroundIncorrect blood component transfusion is the most frequent serious incident associated with transfusion. Errors responsible for these incidents frequently involve patient misidentification.Study Design And MethodsThis study evaluated a barcode patient identification system involving hand-held computers for blood sample collection for compatibility testing and the administration of blood. Audit of practice was carried out before and after its introduction.ResultsThe baseline audit revealed poor practice, particularly in patient identification. Significant improvements were found in the procedure for the administration of blood following the introduction of barcode patient identification, including an improvement from 11.8 to 100 percent in the correct verbal identification of patients (p ConclusionsA barcode patient identification system was found to simplify the clinical transfusion process and improve practice. These results provide support for further work on the development of such systems for transfusion and for other hospital procedures requiring patient identification.

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