Hospital Tissue Management: A Practitioner's Handbook

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This book is designed to be a quick reference tool and guide that covers all aspects of implementing or maintaining a transplant program and maintaining human tissues for transplantation within a hospital. The book incorporates conditions-of-participation regulations with those from nonprofit organizations such as Advancing Transfusion and Cellular Therapies Worldwide (AABB), the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB), and the Eye Bank Association of America (EBAA). The editors tap into the experience of 17 experts who represent these three associations, the leaders in the tissue banking industry. The project was led and published by AABB in cooperation with AATB and EBAA.

Hospitals have the responsibility to provide reliably safe tissues for transplantation. Therefore, regulations that govern any transplant service have to be rigid with regard to the functional acquisition, temporary storage, provision, traceability, monitoring, and evaluation of any allograft used on a patient. This book, along with its excellent references, provides the health care facility and the individuals charged with these duties with an easy-to-follow guide that breaks down the complicated process of adhering to strict guidelines.

This book covers oversight responsibility, centralized functions of tissue services, documentation, inspection, storage and inventory management, recordkeeping and traceability, and quality assurance. It also includes discussion of the history of transplantation, potential disease transmission, US Food and Drug Administration and Joint Commission guidelines, tissue preparation in the OR, and tissue recalls.

In comparison with the AATB Standards for Tissue Banking, which cover practices and procedures within individual procurement and tissue-banking agencies, the Practitioner's Handbook covers important information regarding the handling of allografts within a hospital's transplantation services. The book is well organized, with easily defined sections, and is written in simple, easy-to-understand language. I randomly selected web links and tested them for accuracy and validity. Some of the links were inactive, but the key words within the referenced link were enough to find the resources through a simple Internet search.

The only drawback is the $55 price tag for the individual buyer, but, for hospitals with allograft services, it is worth owning a few copies for employees and using the references as an added educational value. Having these handy references can also be beneficial for hospitals during an audit to show auditors that industry standards are common practice within the facility.