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Hey! I heard about this page in a congress in Switzerland where one of the active members suggested this forum. I am a BLS and work in a blood bank doing antibody screenings and identifications, blood groups, helping wards with their issues with blood products.. etc. We also do platelet and coagulation analysis. Looking forward to see what you guys talk about here. And if there are more Finns, reveal yourself!

Warm auto antibodies, when starting out, can mimic Rh autoantibodies. Usually when they come back a week or so later, all cells including the auto are strongly positive.

Wow. This is one of the reasons why our automated temperature monitoring system has an alarm point and computer access to monitoring directly in the blood bank. If an alarm goes off it starts playing Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin (clicked all the way to 11).

Wash solutions used with some elution kits can cause 'non-specific' uptake of Ig, on to red cells, which can include any alloantibodies that are present. From what I've experienced, anti-K seems to be one of the more commoner specificities affected by this phenomenon. If you did us a kit, for the elution, it would be worth checking the pack insert to see if this is a possibility. An alternative protocol might be given, so it might be worth repeating the elutions.

Hi Carina, The cause is almost certainly a "naturally occurring" (no such thing of course) low level auto-antibody, one mimicking an anti-E and the other mimicking anti-K. I was aware of auto-antibodies mimicking anti-E, but it wasn't until Joyce Poole told me that I became aware of an auto-antibody mimicking an anti-K - I then I found one myself!

I also have to caution that not all degrees are created equal. Be aware that there are ONLINE MLT programs. Yes, they still have to do clinical hours however they come in starting with such a low knowledge base, that the 2 week required stint in the department falls way way short. I have seen them come in for rotations and not even be able to pipette. They have a program where they perform tasks virtually ( like click a button to add reagents). Its horrible. I have to admit that those students, I would not hire for Blood Bank based on my experiences. I do have good things to say about MLT's though. I have seen several who were better than many 4 year techs. I would say proceed with your eyes wide open. MLT's sometiems get a raw deal in my opinion as in many facilities they are expected to perform exactly as an MT, but with less pay and education.

It does not say that the mechanism has to be in blood bank. There are other checklist items in CAP that are just managed by nursing, and that is how we interpret it. Never had a deficiency about it. One item I did take up with nursing was TM.41025, regarding transfusionist training. Nursing had nothing in place, so I worked with the educators to create a testing module that is administered by nursing.

My opinion is that for the analyzer your using it is definitely over calibration. First, CAP and CLIA definately DO NOT require this. Second, it is incredibly wasteful to perform all those multipoint calibrations and QC to turn out a patient result. I find it hard to believe your profiting on this testing unless your volume is very high. Third, it seems to me that calibrating that often could potentially hide imprecision in your analyzer. In other words, if there were something wrong with the analyzer that would cause the results to drift, you would not catch it since you’re constantly ajusting your curve. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, calibration is not without its dangers. What if there was a random inaccuracy in one of the calibration tests; enough to cause a shift, but not a failure. It seems to me that you could actually make a good assay less accurate by calibrating it.