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You could always irradiate the blood bag (as well as the blood), while the stupid nurse is holding it!!!

We had a nurse report that she was issued a unit of blood by a tech and they hadn't removed or changed their gloves before retrieving, tagging and handing her the unit. Now I know that the fridge handle, computer keyboard, and the outside of the unit bag are not "sterile" and the techs obviously wear gloves in the lab. Aside from changing gloves to issue a unit (which of course still become contaminated by touching the aforementioned) what can be done to hand a "clean unit" to a nurse or courier? We place the unit in a plastic bag but we're touching that too! The whole thing is perception - isn't it?

The download option is only available on new devices (when they started this I do not know). I have a mixture of new and old, the new one we download the readings.

Basically there is a bias with the selected samples. I would not be picking a patient with a SPD (Solid Phase Dependent) antibody to compare with manual tube methods. We pull samples that have already been run on the Echo and repeat them in tube testing. I also include a "disclaimer" of sorts in the SOP by stating that the methods may not compare 100% due to the sensitivity and specificity of each test method. The goal is not to achieve perfect correlation, but to document comparable results given the difference in sensitivities, specificities and general limitations between the methods. As we all know and love - no one method will always detect all clinically significant antibodies!