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Background: The global scarcity of blood with imbalanced level of safety is not an exception in Tanzania. This necessitates rational use of blood components to optimise the usage of the available blood components to save lives while instituting safety measures to ensure that blood transfusion is safe. This audit aimed to determine current hospital practices about the appropriateness of transfusions of red cells, platelet and fresh-frozen plasma (FFP) in referral hospitals.

Methods: This was a retrospective cross-sectional study involving secondary data of 1,150 index transfusions from twelve referral hospitals. Multistage cluster and random sampling procedures were used to obtain referral hospitals and index transfusions from blood bank registers respectively. Data were analysed using Stata version 14.1. The categorical variables were summarised into frequency and percentages, while continuous variables were summarised into median with their interquartile range.

Results: In the present audit, 1 150 index blood transfusion episodes were recorded, with only (n= 468; 40.7%) indicating the type of blood component in the request form. Among blood component indicated by type, 460 whole blood/red cells units were requested and transfused. Out of 460 blood units, less than one third (n= 151; 32.8%) were appropriately transfused. The rest of the blood components FFP (n= 3) and platelet concentrate (n= 5) were inappropriately transfused.

Conclusions: The study highlighted a low proportion of appropriate usage of blood and blood component. Educational efforts addressing appropriate use of blood component should be strengthened in transfusing …