From 28 January at 18:00 to 29 January at 20:00, the programme follows the sun — moving from Europe through the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and North Africa, and back to Spain. Register per session and join the PBM perspectives most relevant to you — or follow the full journey across regions.

Check out the full programme, faculty and schedules on the NATA-Website.

Gender-related differences that influence the medical treatment of women were addressed and discussed, as was how women’s health can be brought into focus. The discussion also focused on how women in particular would benefit from the application of patient blood management.

You can find the whole video here!

This years topics are: transfusionstrategies, volume therapy, treatment of the bleeding patient as well as patient blood management.

For further information regarding program and registration, please visit http://www.esafocusmeeting2018.org

Following the opening ceremony by Prof. Dr. Dr. K. Zacharowski, internationally renowned PBM experts presented informative, exciting and entertaining updates on the implementation of PBM in various countries around the globe. For instance, while Prof. A. Shander talked about news from the United States, Prof. T. Richards and Dr. A. Klein presented on the national PBM quality standards of the United Kingdom. Prof. G. Liumbruno gave an update on a new law passed in Italy, obligating Italian hospitals to implement PBM. Prof. B. Froessler, who came all the way from Australia, gave a lecture on the successful national PBM initiative and the related study including data of more than 600,000 patients.

To appreciate the efforts undertaken to improve the implementation of PBM globally, all international PBM experts were awarded with the “International PBM Implementation Award” by the Global PBM Network.

After lunch, the early afternoon program was focused on the German PBM Network. In an introduction, Prof. Dr. P. Meybohm talked about structure and advantageous of becoming a member of the network. Later on he described more recent developments and future plans. In the following, three speakers from different PBM hospitals presented on their positive experiences, challenges as well as success while implementing PBM within the German PBM Network.

To appreciate the outstanding efforts, all three speakers and their associated hospitals (Dr. Kerstin Große Wortmann, Herzogin Elisabeth Hospital Braunschweig; Dr. Patrick Stark, Mittelmoselklinikum Zell; Dr. Josef Thoma, Ortenau Klinikum Offenburg-Gengenbach) were presented with the “German PBM Implementation Award”.

The afternoon talks were finalised by exciting presentations on PBM as seen through the eyes of the controlling and the patient advocate, respectively.

Following this, a panel discussion with representatives of different medical fields (surgery, anaesthesiology, transfusion medicine), health insurance, patient advocate and controlling took place. An important topic discussed was how to improve approval and funding of PBM by health insurances. It was agreed that PBM is an important part of patient care, making further steps for an improved implementation mandatory.

At the very end, hospitals and members of the German PBM Network were awarded with PBM certificates. The certified hospitals are shown in our digital PBM map.

We are happy, that so many national and international guests were part of the symposium.

This years meeting brought togehter international hospital leaders, medical and information technology companies, the patient advocacy community, public policy makers and government officials, from 25 nations. Besides others, Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States of America, presented a keynote. During the summit approaches on how to reach the joint goal of ZERO preventable deaths by 2020 were discussed.

The potential of Patient Blood Management to contribute to this goal was already identified in 2016. The presentation of the Humanitarian Award to Prof. Dr. Dr. Kai Zacharowski in the same year was the onset for a close and ever-growing collaboration. For instance,  Prof. Dr. Dr. Zacharowski and Prof. Dr. Meybohm took the chance and founded the World PBM Network during the “5th Annual Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit” held in the USA in 2017.

During this year’s meeting, Prof. Dr. Dr. Zacharowski reported on the number of lives that can be saved by implementing Patient Blood Management. During his talk he presented numbers and closed with a invetation of the audience to participate in the World PBM Network. The presentation is available for replay by clicking on the image to the left. In order to view the presentation, please select “filter by saturday” and click “Chapter 5: Commitment Announcement: University Hospital Frankfurt”.

Further details on the collaboration between Prof. Dr. Dr. Zacharowski and the Patient Safety Movement are given in a spotlight in the recent newsletter published by the Patient Safety Movement. Please click the image to view the full text.

Detailed information is given on the symposium webpage.

We are looking forward to your participation.

As part of this meeting, the World PBM Network was founded. By expanding our networks to the global scale, we aim to offer support to all hospitals wordwide, which are interested in implementing Patient Blood Management and thus to increase patient safety.

Additional to presentations and discussions, the top three spots of an idea contest were awarded prices sponsored by the Christoph Lohfert Stiftung. We received numerous great ideas on how to further improve Patient Blood Management and picking the top spots was tricky task.

Parallel to the symposium, the German Red Cross Blood Donor Service Baden-Wuerttemberg-Hessen carried out a well-received blood donation event.