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Hi, I am Lorenzo Monato a medical technologist for 20 years now and currently working at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in Las Vegas at the Transfusion/Blood Bank Dept. I am also the LIS for the department. I accidentally found this site when i was searching for new ISBT 128 product codes for our facility. Got curious and here I am a proud member of this community.

I work at a blood center and I can tell you that though super rare, mislabeling does happen. Not sub-groups, or variants, but actual wrong blood in the wrong bag situations. I have only seen a very small number of these and they always involve the most unbelievable, bizarre, "were they TRYING to mess up" situations. These situations usually result in 2 first time donors having their blood drawn into a bag labeled with one number and the tubes labeled another number, now both bags have the wrong blood/label. First time donors do not have history to catch these discrepancies. I would never suggest the confirmation step at the hospital be removed, especially with electronic XM so prevalent now. I guess it's been at least 6 or 7 years since we had one of these.

And it is a whole lot easier to say. By the way, the U stands for Underwood; this is the name of one of the early patients identified with a partial D.

Hi Logan, I am an AABB perioperative assessor (and laboratory manager )that works at a facility in Boston MA that uses cell salvage on over 3,000 cases annually. We have 11 machines, and although we are not (yet) accredited by AABB, with the work we have done with our program, we are hoping to be accredited for periop by our next BB inspection. I got involved in this because our SVP for surgical services asked me, as the resident AABB SME, LOL, to evaluate effectiveness of cell salvage at our facility. She wanted us to adhere to the AABB standards and thought I was their best candidate to lead the effort. 6 years later, the past practice is truly history. To answer your question, we do QC quarterly on each machine that we have in use--- Hgb and Albumin. AABB allows you to decide what and how much is needed, but for quality purposes, you really do need something to make sure your equipment (and operator) is obtaining the best possible product for the patient in between PM's. If you would like more information on our approach, I am happy to share what we do, just message me and I will give you my work contact information. Between Cell Salvage and other specific PBM strategies, we have reduced our organization-wide transfusion ratio per adjusted patient discharge, from 0.78 to 0.17, in ~5 years time. ( Caveat: The cell salvage program overhaul took some time and was truly implemented last). I actually like to think it is because Blood Bank is involved, but honestly, it takes a village and I had to build influence up with the surgical services team and make really good use of my role as Transfusion Committee Facilitator to make things happen. Best, Linda