A safety system pioneered in Oxford to prevent potentially deadly mistakes being made during blood transfusions would save lives if introduced across the UK, a city hospital consultant has said.

Two years ago, Oxford hospitals became the first in the world to introduce an electronic transfusion management system, using barcodes printed on patients’ wristbands to ensure the right blood was given to the right patient.

However, since then, despite apparently eradicating human error in complex procedures, hardly any other NHS trusts have adopted the system.

Prof Mike Murphy, consultant haematologist at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital and the national health authority NHS Blood and Transplant, who led the development of the new system, said the manual procedures it replaced were extremely complicated.

They involved 27 ‘critical steps’ and required two nurses and two wristbands, making it “practically impossible” to carry out the whole process correctly.

Figures from a national reporting scheme reveal there have been more than 4,000 “adverse events” related to transfusions across the country over the past 11 years.

Prof Murphy, giving evidence to MPs on the House of Commons health select committee inquiry into patient safety, said 70 per cent of these cases involved patients who were given the wrong blood because of “entirely avoidable” errors.

However, he said that following the introduction of the barcoded system in Oxford, at a cost of £1.5m over five years, he was now “absolutely confident” that nurses and other staff were “doing it right every time”.

Prof Murphy, an Oxford University academic, said: “While the risks associated with blood transfusion have come down, there are still some patients who are getting the wrong blood – and this could be stopped and lives could saved.”

He expressed frustration that despite several years of development and extensive pilot schemes, across 100 clinical areas in Oxford’s hospitals, plus almost two years of full operation across the city, a system that could have been rolled out nationally in 2007 was undergoing a further lengthy trial.

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