Inventory Management

About Inventory Management

Blood inventory is unusual as inventory goes. Every unit expires, on a different clock depending on what it was made into — platelets in days, red cells in weeks, plasma in months — and it is not interchangeable, because a unit is only useful to a patient it is compatible with. So a centre can hold plenty of stock and still be unable to answer a request, which is the failure that matters and the one a headline stock figure hides.

The two things that go wrong pull in opposite directions. Hold too little of a group and you are refusing requests or sending relatives to another centre; hold too much and you are discarding units on expiry, which is a donation somebody gave for nothing. Getting between those requires knowing demand by component and by group rather than in total, issuing oldest-compatible-first as a rule rather than a habit, and seeing expiry far enough ahead to move a unit while it is still worth moving.

These posts cover par levels, expiry handling, transfers between centres, the mistakes that recur, and why a spreadsheet stops being adequate earlier than most centres expect.

• Stock and expiry reporting →
• One stock view across centres →
• How inventory fits the wider system →