Preoperative blood typing might be excluded for some pediatric surgeries

There was a small study made by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children`s Center and published in the journal Pediatric Anesthesia that proves that certain pediatric surgeries have a low risk of serious blood loss, so there`s no need to do blood typing or blood stocking prior to these procedures. “We knew anecdotally that just-in-case blood typing and ordering are often unnecessary and wasteful but we wanted to know precisely when we may be able to safely skip them”, says study lead investigator Allison Fernández, M.D., a pediatric anesthesiologist at All Children's Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine in St. Petersburg, Fla. Fernández conducted the research as a pediatric anesthesiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center in 2012. “The moral of the story here is that times have changed and we transfuse less than we have in the past, so now we find that quite a few children undergo unnecessary blood-typing and cross-matching before common surgeries”, says study senior investigator Eugenie Heitmiller, M.D., a pediatric anesthesiologist at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. “These results tell us we should really pause and re-examine this practice”.