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Essay about Blood Platelet Bank

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Solving Blood Platelet Banks Model Using

1 Corresponding

Introduction

A platelet is a disk-shaped structure found in the blood of all mammals, playing a major role in the coagulation of blood 1; platelets are transfused to patients to treat or prevent bleeding during surgery and other medical conditions associated with platelet deficiency or function defect. Platelets shelf life for transfusion purposes is up to six days; however, due to testing, platelets are generally not released to inventory until 24 hours after the collection time. Therefore, usable platelet shelf life is generally five days. This is an extremely short product shelf life compared to other blood products. This makes inventory management of platelets …show more content…

Whenever there is a shortage, a special

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order must be placed to look for the required blood platelets elsewhere or to look for donors. Therefore, the inventory of these blood platelets needs to be actively managed. While a patient should receive blood platelets of the same type, blood platelet substitution is possible between certain blood platelet types. The distribution of blood type at different countries are listed in Table 1 and the average demand and supply in USA is shown in Table 2. Table 3 shows all the substitution possibilities for all blood types (BloodProducts 2011)1 , where ’1’ indicates that the substitution is allowed between these two blood types, and ’0’ means that substitution is not allowed between these two blood types. Since the distribution of supply does not match with that of demand, blood centers often run short of types B and O. This, however, does not mean that supply of other blood types is abundant. Shortages of all blood types occur, especially during summer and winter holidays (USABlood 2011). In addition to blood platelet type, age of the blood platelet will also be considered in the developed model.

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Country/Blood Type Canada Finland Hong Kong USA AB+ 2.5 7 7 3 AB– 0.5 1 0.02 1 A+ 36 38 25.9 34 A– 6 6 0.08 6 B+ 7.6 15 26.9 9 Type/Blood Type Demand Supply AB+ 3 3.4 AB– 1 0.65 A+ 34 27.9 A– 6 5.17 B+ 9 11.63 3

Table 1: Blood type percentage distribution in

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