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Nursing policy for blood administration should include those type of guidelines, They have references available for infusion rate, etc. The medical director of blood bank should (ideally) then review all of those polices to make sure that what they have included is good practice. In other words, a collaborative procedure. We struggle with getting blood/blood product nursing policies reviewed when written. There is a constant rotation of new nursing admin staff writing policies who never seem to know that our medical director should review those new policies and they don't understand what the lab has to do with administration. I just tell them it's an FDA requirement and TJC expects those requirements to be followed. Our nursing policies are accessible on-line so I search periodically for blood related policies to see if anything has been added. I put all of those policies in my SOP manual under blood administration. When I do biannual review, I check to see if the policy has been revised so I can upload a new version if necessary. I usually check at least annually as well. The policy format used by my facility assigns 'ownership', which is the VP of nursing, 'authorship' and also includes a line which indicates people who must review the policy. TJC requires policy review every 3 years, so that's why I include those policies in my manuals - to make sure they are reviewed often enough for CAP requirements. If I find a policy that does not have the medical director's name on it as a required reviewer, I reach out to the 'author' or the 'owner' to see about getting it added. I've also made a point of knowing who is responsible for the facility policy manuals and who is responsible for the Joint Commission compliance book. I have those 2 ladies on speed dial and they are very helpful. It can be painfully slow to deal with all the committees/councils that direct nursing policy. I tell myself that persistence and patience is key (and patience is not necessarily one of my virtues!).

We supply blood to a helicopter service with a contract with our hospital system. We put Safe-T-Vue indicators on all of their units. They provide us a copy of their in-flight chart when they transfuse anyone not coming to our hospitals. If the patient doesn't come to us but has an account in our HIS, we create a bogus registration in our BBIS using a defined format account number. If they don't exist in our HIS, we create a complete registration manually in our BBIS using a defined format for MR# etc. Then we emergency issue the product in our BBIS and handle it just as we would those patients who expire before a specimen is drawn etc. We charge the helicopter service for the products which they include in their flat fee to the patient. We maintain the final disposition records for any lookbacks etc. If we got a market withdrawal or lookback, we would notify the helicopter company to follow up with the recipient. That duty is at least vaguely covered in our agreement with them, I believe. We tell the helicopter crew to return any unused products to us and not to leave them at the receiving hospital but this isn't perfect. We sometimes transfer products on paper to the receiving site if we can document handling sufficiently. It doesn't work easily if the receiving hospital doesn't use the same blood supplier.

Please be sure to recruit the brother as blood donor as he is a valuable donor.