IN-SERVICE TRAINING WITH VIDEOTAPE IS USEFUL IN TEACHING TRANSFUSION MEDICINE PRINCIPLES

Background: Failure to follow the basics of patient identification cau sed the ABO-incompatible transfusion and death of an anesthetized pati ent. An investigation found that the medical center's transfusion poli cy, while adequate, was not being disseminated uniformly to all person nel. Study Design and Methods: With the help of the hospital's medical media department, a 23-minute videotape was produced emphasizing the importance of patient identification during phlebotomy and blood admin istration. Each department involved in blood transfusion was separatel y trained for a total of 182 persons trained. To assess whether learni ng had occurred, a 10-question quiz was administered both before and a fter the video was presented. A one-tailed t test was performed, and p <0.05 was considered significant. Results: The overall pre-video test mean was 8.0 and the post-video test mean was 9.5. The difference was highly significant at p<0.00005. Except for the Transfusion Medicine S ervice, which had a perfect score on the pre-video test, all departmen ts improved their scores with p values ranging from less than 0.00005 to 0.014. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that learning did occur. Videotape is useful for in-service training and can be used for teach ing on a variety of topics in transfusion medicine.