As I am approaching the eve of my retirement, this will be the last review I write for the NBA’s annual report. It has been my privilege to lead the NBA for eight years from its nascent beginnings to its successful professional management of our responsibilities.
During our usual hectic year, there is one event that stands out in my mind as most significant because it illustrates the value of the networks and relationships, supply planning and risk management that the NBA has implemented.
In September 2010, Octapharma, our principal supplier of imported intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) undertook a global recall of its product Octagam. Octapharma was expected to supply 17 per cent of our IVIg this year.
The recall was issued on 24 September and NBA staff immediately started securing alternative supplies. In the week that followed we received offers of replacement stock from major global suppliers. The NBA’s risk planning meant that our contract with Lateral Diagnostics also allowed us to source and purchase alternative products from them.
The suppliers were models of cooperation and worked intensively with us over the next weeks to locate and remove all the recalled product and to introduce the new product. The Blood Service was central in assisting with the transition and design and distribution of clinical information. We also drew on CSL’s inventory of IVIg, which had been built up in previous years under our contractual arrangements, to minimise the need for patients to change products mid-treatment.
This was no small task, and ensuring that this process was undertaken within weeks and without disrupting patients’ lives, was vital. I am grateful for the support of industry suppliers and the Blood Service that enabled this to be achieved. All patients were successfully transitioned to an alternate product with no interruption to their treatment.
As the incident above indicates, the NBA attaches a great deal of importance to the relationships we have with our stakeholders.
Stakeholder relationships are particularly critical for our clinical development team and their program of work on the clinical use of blood. I am very humbled by the contribution of so many busy clinicians who volunteer their time and effort to work with the NBA, sifting through endless research papers and developing the exact wording of recommendations to improve clinical practice.
This year we were delighted to publish the first module of the Patient Blood Management Guidelines—Critical Bleeding/Massive Transfusion, under the auspices of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). A second module on perioperative blood management is nearing finalisation.
Data is critical to most work in the blood sector whether it is to facilitate a recall or identify improvement opportunities. BloodNet, the new national online blood ordering and receipting system, will, when fully implemented, provide real-time information on inventory for all blood and blood products, anywhere in Australia.
BloodNet offers governments and staff in hospitals real-time access to important information such as orders, deliveries and, shortly, the fate of products. Those using BloodNet will be able to see the products within their inventory and will be able to track product trends over time.
This tool will be invaluable in supporting improvements in the blood sector and I congratulate those at the NBA and those who drove the project originally in Queensland.
To date, BloodNet has been rolled out in the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and several sites in Victoria, with Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and some sites in New South Wales to be implemented early in 2011–12.
An event which will be largely opaque to the Australian public is the work that the NBA has undertaken on the Dublin Consensus Statement. This initiative arose out of discussions between the NBA and PLUS (an international coalition of plasma users) in 2009.
The goal was to negotiate a set of principles on donor management which could be accepted by like-minded global blood sector stakeholders including patients, donors, manufacturers and provider organisations. The first Statement produced in 2010 was fully endorsed by 22 patient organisations.
Further work in early 2011 resulted in a revised Statement and a significantly broader group of endorsees that now include international blood sector organisations representing blood donors, European and USA alliances of users and managers of blood, and not-for-profit plasma fractionators.
The NBA operates within the broader health sector and is very conscious of the impact on the sector of the continuing escalation of expenditure on blood and blood products. One of the major challenges for the NBA in the next 12 months will be to achieve certainty on the priorities required of the NBA by all governments and the funding associated with that, as identified in the Administrative Review of the National Blood Arrangements 2009.
I am very proud of our achievements and would like to acknowledge the great efforts and work of NBA staff over the years to provide a secure supply of products essential for patient health and to driving continual improvement in the efficiency of the sector.
Dr Alison Turner
General Manager and Chief Executive Officer
National Blood Authority