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I am enormously honoured to announce that I am going to be awarded the Gold Medal of the British Blood Transfusion Society at their Annual Scientific Meeting in Brighton this year. It is awarded to an individual for their exceptional and long standing services to the Society and to the practice of blood transfusion in the UK. Sorry if this sounds egocentric, but I am very excited.

Scott, I mostly agree with you but I would add one more caveat, adequate training, oversight AND practice/consistent use of the skill. If you have staff that seldom to rarely rotate through the department their skills will diminish and as far as oversight, no one likes working with someone constantly looking over their shoulder. To respond to Cliffs comment, you are absolutely correct, no technique is perfect. If it were everyone would be doing it the same way. One technique will fit a certain situation better than another but not technique addresses the needs of everyone.

That is awesome news and well deserved!!!!!

Automation comes with it's problems too. We had solid phase for our last instruments, now we're on gel. We have a 2+ cut-off to call someone Rh Pos. Now we are changing the types of lot's of people from Rh Neg to Rh Pos because gel is more sensitive. Plus, we seem to get a lot of "gel junk". This is new to us, so we started doing full peg panels on anything the machine interpreted as positive. Almost all of the panels were negative. We switched to a peg 2 cell screen. Then there is what our techs are calling sprinkles. A clear negative reaction, but a few tiny clumps sprinkled above the button. I'm afraid they'll change these to negative before sending them across the interface. They likely are negative though. No method is perfect.

I take it that you have discussed this with the likes of Geoff Daniels, Joyce Poole, Nicole Thornton etc, plus the equivalent blood group serology greats of the USA, the Netherlands, etc, almost all of whom swear by manual tube testing, as do I. Yes, without a doubt, if you are not competent in this technique through lack of proper training and constant practice, then it has many pitfalls, but to condemn a technique outright as being almost prehistoric is a bit rich, with all due respect.