First announcment: PBM Consensus Conference

Patient Blood Management (PBM) aims to optimise the care of patients who might need a blood transfusion. The American Association of Blood Banks (AABB), the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Transfusionsmedizin und Immunhämatologie (DGTI), the French Society of Blood Transfusion (SFTS) and the European Blood Alliance (EBA) are committed to advance PBM. These organisations, jointly with several partners will organise a two day consensus conference to present the available evidence on PBM and develop recommendations.

CONSENSUS CONFERENCE METHOD
To focus all the available studies, the Scientific Committee, chaired by Prof. Erhard Seifried, formulated specific questions within three chosen topics of PBM:
I. Preoperativeanaemia
II. Red Blood Cell (RBC) transfusion triggers,
III. Education and implementation of PBM.
The Centre for Evidence-Based Practice from the Belgian Red Cross will carry out a systematic evidence-based review on the specific PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) questions around these three topics. All information from this systematic review will be presented at the consensus conference. The multidisciplinary expert panels, with the input from the audience of the conference, will develop recommendations using a transparent evidence-to-recommendation framework (GRADE approach). The consensus statements with the supporting evidence will be published afterwards.

TIME, VENUE AND PARTICIPANTS
The Conference will take place on 24 and 25 April 2018 in the Maritim Hotel, Frankfurt, Germany. To ensure a balanced audience of stakeholders, the ICC-PBM2018 will have a two-tiered registration system. 250 Invited key stakeholders from across all the world will be sent a booking link to the registration site. All who are interested in joining the conference will be
invited to pre-register. When seats become available in February, the organising committee will invite pre-registrants to register for the event via a separate link and issue a special booking code. This will be done according to the following criteria:

• Order of registration
• Ensuring a balanced audience of all kinds of stakeholders
• Availability to attend
• Geographical region/country

You can pre-register here.