Distribution of blood products to hospitals

Labile blood products

The labile blood products manufactured by Héma-Québec are perishable blood components, including packed red blood cells, platelets and platelets by apheresis, plasma products and cryoprecipitates.

As soon as a product is compliant and duly labelled, it is ready to be sent to Québec hospitals. The components of a bag of blood collected on a Monday, for example, are ready to be delivered on Tuesday at the end of the day.

On duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, our Customer Service (Hospitals) and Shipping departments receive the orders from the hospitals and prepare the blood products for delivery.

Every day, we receive approximately 200 orders from the hospital centres we serve throughout Québec. Every year, we supply hospitals with more than 300,000 labile blood products to meet recipients’ needs.

Stable products

What are stable products?

Stable products have a much longer shelf life than labile blood products, which explains their qualifier. Stable products are obtained by fractioning the various proteins contained in human plasma or through recombinant manufacturing techniques requiring little or no plasma. They are used for various therapeutic purposes.

Héma-Québec acts only as a distributor of stable products for Québec. It does not manufacture stable products.

We purchase stable products from partner suppliers, manage the inventory of these products and ensure the supply for our client hospitals.

Moreover, we send a portion of the plasma produced from whole blood donations (details) to a fractionation facility that extracts stable products from it. These products are also part of our inventory of stable products.

Categories distributed by Héma-Québec

The categories of stable products we distribute include:

• Intravenous immunoglobulins or IVIg (extracted from plasma)

• Antihemophilic or coagulation factors (extracted from plasma or recombinant)

• Albumin (extracted from plasma)

• Hyperimmune immunoglobulins (extracted from plasma)

Intravenous immunoglobulins and the recombinant antihemophilic factors represent more than 70% of the stable product budget. The value of the stable products distributed to Québec hospitals represents more than half of our total budget.