Established under the Punjab Transfusion of Safe Blood Ordinance, 1999, the Punjab Blood Transfusion Authority remained dormant till 2013 due to financial, logistic and human resource constraints. The Authority started functioning in 2013 under the current administration and took to the task of developing guidelines, tools, forms and formats for its functions immediately after assuming office. Thereafter, the Authority announced through print media, the requirement for all blood establishments to register with the Authority within a certain time frame, failure of which made establishments liable to legal proceedings. As a response, the Authority started receiving applications and was able to start the process of registration of blood establishments.
Henceforth, the Authority has received 450 applications for registrations, whereas licensing inspections have been carried out in around 120 blood establishments. Licenses have been awarded to 40 blood establishments, whereas around 10 establishments have been permanently closed for critical non-compliances identified by the PBTA. The rest of the establishments have been given observations with a time frame for rectifying deficiencies. A notable handicap of the Authority in this respect was the non-existence of inspections in the structure of the PBTA till April 2015.
The Punjab PBTA has been able to organize itself into a separate units in-charge of governance of the sector [PBTA members comprising a broad stakeholder group including Advisor to Chief Minister on Health/ MPA, Secretary PBTA, MPAs (medical doctors), Additional Secretary Health, Director General Health, Executive Directors of Hospitals, Director of IBTS, Project Director Punjab AIDS Control Program, Professors of Medicine and Surgery, Commandant CMH, and Civil Society Representatives (Fatimid, PRCS)], licensing (licensing board), and technical aspects (technical committee).
In addition, efforts for strengthening the organizational structure and the capacity to carry out licensing inspections has led to the nomination of at least 3 inspectors in each of the districts of Punjab (the district health officer as the focal person and the desk officer, a pathologist/ haematologist/ blood transfusion expert to carry out the actual licensing inspections and the district drug controller to check for gross non-compliances, which may not require a lot of technical expertise and the operation of facilities who have not applied for registrations).
In a series of province-wide trainings in 4 cities of Punjab (Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Multan and Lahore), these inspectors have been trained in their respective roles. With a total of 150 inspectors nominated and trained to perform inspections across the province, a pool of inspectors has been created. These inspectors, however, need on-going training in specialized areas like use of information technology, data management, and other specialized areas.
Punjab Blood Transfusion Authority (PBTA) is the provincial regulatory body ensuring safe, ethical, and high-quality blood transfusion services across Punjab. We monitor and license all blood establishments involved in the vein-to-vein transfusion process.
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