Abstract
Surgery for DDH is one of the common paediatric orthopaedics procedures in a tertiary care paediatrics hospital.
There are no uniformly agreed guidelines about the pre-operative work up related to blood transfusion in DDH surgery. This leads to lack of uniformity in practice, sometimes causes cancellations of operations on the day of surgery (due to no cross matched blood available) and on other occasions wastage of the cross matched blood.
The aims of our study were to know the incidence of perioperative blood transfusion in a series of DDH operations and to determine what types of operations/kids have more chances of needing a blood transfusion peri-operatively.
We included all children who had surgery for DDH between April 2009 and October 2012 in our institution. We found out which of these children had blood transfusion peri-operatively and reviewed their notes to determine any trends in transfusion requirements
165 children had operations for DDH during the study period. This included operations ranging from hip open reduction to Ganz osteotomy.
6 out of 165 (4%) were transfused blood. Children needing blood transfusion tended to be older and had multiple hip operations previously. Only 3 (2 during Ganz and 1 during bilateral hip reconstruction) of these 6 children needed intra-operative blood transfusion. None of the under 4 years old children needed intra-operative blood transfusion.
We conclude that children for unilateral primary hip operations for DDH do not need pre operative blood cross match. A group and save is enough in these cases.
