Cliff

Yup, she has contacted me and we're working with her IT department.

Thank you kindly. And for those that are not fortunate enough to have received written correspondence from Malcolm, his handwriting is impeccable. The files are now in the Library:

Thanks, I did read this but did not take it as a strict rule that it must be infused within 4 hours after leaving it's controlled environment. I need something more substantial than "undesirable". Regardless, I may make the suggestion we change to 4 hours from the time it leaves it's controlled environment.

I think we can all agree that products must be transfused within 4 hours. I cannot find when this 4 hour window starts. Does it start from the time the transfusion starts? What if it took 45 minutes from the time it left a controlled environment to the time it started? Do I only have 3:15 left? Do you have a policy on when the 4 hour time starts? I'd like to propose it's from the time it leaves the controlled environment. This would be a huge change for an organization as large as us, I want to make sure I'm not missing something. Thanks

Hmm, I got neither. I am having email issues. If you sent it to my Verizon email, please PM me and I'll give you my gmail address. Verizon is working sporadically, I suspect they don't care as they are going out of the email business.

June 17 I will run up it again, then I am doing the ride up it in August.

Try this link: http://www.stjoeshealth.org/body.cfm?id=6&iirf_redirect=1

Another vote for validate. We had a call with two people from FDA. Our IT wanted to do a build on server A, all of the testing and validation on server A, then at go live, exactly replicate server A on server B and have server B be the new production server. Our IT said since it would be identical it would not need validation. I disagreed (as I often do), hence the call with FDA. FDA agreed that server B was not validated and not suitable for use prior to testing and validation. When I approach these events I try and understand what I want to accomplish. Am I just meeting a regulation and there is no safety to the patient / donor added? Then I do the least required. Is there a chance, even a small one, that data could get compromised? Then I do a full validation, regardless of what's required.

I suspect your answers will vary wildly. We are a level 1 and we also support a huge OR and very busy cancer center. We are a donor center, we are about 15 miles from our supplier. Our minimum inventory for platelets is 30.

Sorry, I read this with my blood bank hat on, I would not want sattelite blood bank labs.

We're a fairly big facility with a level 1 trauma center, 40ish ORs and a large cancer center we support. We do not have any satellite labs, nor are we even considering it. Why do you feel this would be better? Is the ER part of your facility?

I know this post is almost 4 years old, but it was quoted a couple of hours ago and I find the highlighted part interesting. Not sure how big of a facility you are, or how much you transfuse. We're decent size, we transfuse about 24 - 28k RBCs a year. I've been at my current location for 26 years. That's approaching three quarters of a million red cells we've retyped in my time there. I recall only one unit we received from a facility that was mislabeled. That's pretty good evidence that retyping, while required, does not add a lot of value. The odds that something would go wrong are beyond astronomical. You'd have to have a mislabeled unit, you'd be on downtime, it would mistakenly get into the retyped area, then it would have to go to a patient where it could cause harm, then the odds that it actually would cause harm are still small.

Yay!

Yup, no matter how we label them, we get a lot of platelets back in the cooler. Again, we issue over 30 a day so there is bound to be some wasted, but this makes staff very frustrated.