Africa, March 2025 – The World Health Organization (WHO) has unveiled a comprehensive guidance document on Patient Blood Management (PBM) to address the global burden of impaired blood health, affecting more than three billion individuals worldwide. Conditions such as anaemia, iron deficiency and bleeding disorders have profound public health, economic, and patient-level consequences, costing billions in productivity losses, health care expenditures, and diminished quality of life.
The WHO Policy Brief highlights that poor blood health represents one of the world’s largest, yet largely preventable, public health and health-economic burdens. To tackle this crisis, the WHO has developed a practical guidance document on PBM, a patient-centred approach designed to manage and preserve an individual’s own blood.
The WHO urges all Member States to prioritize blood health as a global public health goal and integrate PBM into their health care frameworks. By improving blood health, PBM has the potential to save billions of health care dollars, reduce transfusion dependency, and reallocate resources to where they are most needed. This initiative is central to tackling health care inequities and ensuring that hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide can benefit from improved blood health.
It is anticipated this groundbreaking document will soon be released in other languages.