Clinical and Research Update

Our clinical team works across NHSBT providing clinical leadership to our strategy for donor selection and care, and the delivery of patient services and products. The clinical team also advises hospital colleagues, oversees the clinical governance framework, and provides specialist input to organisational changes. The Medical Director also leads a major research programme as well as the safety programme across NHSBT.

Our emphasis on safety and clinical quality remains high - and 2010/11 was the first year where there were no transmissions of bacteria, viruses or vCJD prions in 2010/11. Cases of transfusion-related acute lung injury were also at their lowest ever recorded. We appointed to a new Assistant Director level post for Clinical Operations and Governance to maintain this performance and give new energy to our organisation-wide commitment to clinical quality.

In response to high levels of flu in the community, we provided plasma collected from people who had recovered from flu to support critically ill flu patients in Intensive Care - including many with depressed immunity. We are now working with a team of Intensivists to design a trial to assess this approach on a formal basis.

We continue to invest in future medical leaders by creating clinical fellow posts and, in collaboration with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), developing academic training posts in specialties relevant to transfusion and transplantation.

Our research and development activities have been recognised as world class following a five yearly international review. However this also highlighted the need to align research activities to our core purpose. We responded by appointing a new Assistant Director for Research and Development and expanding our support team.

We have organised research activities into eight themes linking to business areas and overseen by Strategy Groups including research, development and operational staff. We have also successfully appointed two new Principal Investigators in key research areas: virology (Dr Lars Dolken, Cambridge) and organ transplantation (Professor Rutger Ploeg, Oxford).

A comparison of patient and graft survival rates following kidney donation after circulatory death (DCD) with donation after brain death (DBD) showed that kidneys from controlled DCD donors are equivalent to kidneys from DBD donors in first time recipients. In other work, an analysis of malignancy in UK transplant recipients has shown that many forms of cancer have a higher incidence in transplant recipients than the general UK population. Differences between transplant types suggest that cancer incidence is higher in lung transplant recipients. And this work has important consequences for cancer screening in transplant recipients.