−80 °C deep frozen erythrocytes during military operations. The Dutch frozen concept

The Dutch military uses frozen blood products for the treatment of bleeding trauma patients during military deployments. With −80 °C frozen blood products it is possible to follow operational demand while reducing the number of resupply transports and loss of products due to expiration. In this paper lessons learned are described on efficient blood management with −80 °C deep-frozen erythrocytes (DEC).