Geneva, Switzerland, 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.
PBM aims to improve blood health globally by addressing iron deficiency, anaemia, blood loss, and bleeding disorders.The approach aligns with the principles of health promotion, health protection, and disease prevention, offering significant benefits for patient outcomes, safety, and quality of care. Evidence shows that PBM reduces morbidity, mortality, and length of hospital stay, while also delivering substantial economic benefits for health care systems.
The development of this guidance document involved extensive collaboration among international experts, including public health professionals, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, hospital administrators, and patient advocates. Contributions from health care systems with established PBM programmes provide valuable insights into replicating successful structures and processes to improve population health. The model outlines three phases: preparing health care systems for PBM, conducting pilot projects, and rolling out PBM nationally.
To support implementation, the document provides tailored PBM toolkits for diverse populations and resource levels. These toolkits offer practical strategies for managing iron deficiency, anaemia, blood loss, and coagulopathy, ensuring comprehensive care across various health care settings. The guidance document also emphasizes the importance of embedding PBM processes in resource-constrained systems to reduce maternal mortality from postpartum haemorrhage, traumatic haemorrhage, and anaemia.
Dr Yukiko Nakatani, Assistant Director-General WHO states: “With this implementation guidance, PBM should now become part of the public health agenda for all Member States.”
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.