[red dot]

It should be an indicator of topics you have posted in.

[Are you supporting continuing education opportunities?]

Being a larger facility, 100+ employees, even we don't have pockets deep enough to send all of our staff off-site for CE. What we do have though is many in house opportunities. We have always had a CE requirement for our staff, I am not aware of what ASCP requires. We allow things as simple as reading newsletters, we subscribe to ABC Newsletter, AABB Weekly and Citings.

As for AABB, we send about 10, but it's all management staff.

[Prospective review for all blood components]

We are rather large 700+, and only do a retrospective audit. Our current LIS, homegrown, does not support prospective auditing. We hope our new system, Mediware, will be able to do this. We will have it implemented by next September and are working with Mediware to tie to our LIS and possibly do prospective auditing.

Good luck.

[Need help with pneumatic tube transport of units]

My apologies. In setting up this new version of the forum, I forget to reset the allowed document type.

Would you mind trying again? it should allow .dot and .doc file types now.

[Need help with pneumatic tube transport of units]

Hi John,

Would you be willing to share those? Word docs and pdf files can be attached to posts here.

[Need help with pneumatic tube transport of units]

Hi Jane,

We have two tube systems. They grow all the time here.

Our Pevco system works OK for some of the smaller routs, but can't handle the loads of our main system.

Our main system is from TransLogic. It is fantastic. Our facility is 16 stories and some parts are over 1/4 mile away too. It has the ability to pull at least three units to either of those locations.

As for issuing (signout) we simply indicate "T" for tube for the transporter. The validation was a bit tougher. Like most validations we created it on our own.

We measured:

Trip time

Product temp

Cannister Temp (using a TempTale)

Weight of products.

We did 20 runs with an empty cannister, 20 with multiple cold products and 20 with multiple RT products. We set what we felt were acceptable limits.

There are many stations here, we don't approve all of them for blood products at this point. In our EW, they are extremely large so we have a remote alarm system to alert them that blood has arrived. For another high use floor, they need to enter an access code to remove the cannister. They can't shut off the alarm or use the tube system until they do.

Let me know if you have any other questions, I'll be glad to help.

[recommend t-shirt supplier]

Jeanette, That is a great site, thanks for posting it!!

[Computer Assisted Interactive Interview]

Hi ljw, One thing that would be great is if it could be a module to install into other systems. I had seen prototype of Talisman many years ago and found it disappointing, but promising. The version I saw did not make the "decision" of donor acceptability. I suppose that way you avoid the 510k mess.

Either way good luck.

[SOP for Proficiency Testing]

I agree that SOP sharing is a great idea, unfortunately I don't have one to share.

I wanted to mention that documents can be attached to the posting. That way everyone can download it.

[Samples during collection]

We collect pre-admission samples from our autologous donors. We will be stopping this soon as it is not the business of the donor center to collect patient samples.

I had a question though. Some of these patients / donors have a significant amount collected for their samples. We deduct this amount from the WB we collect to ensure patient safety.

Recently we had a talk about this. Do other people worry about what their donors may have or will have collected on the day of donation as patient samples? If so, how do you manage this?

Thanks.

[Scale QC]

I was wondering what others are doing for scale QC. OK, balance QC, not donor scales.

Currently we do fours weights each day on each scale, regardless if it is used:

20g

100g

200g

500g

One of the supervisors here proposed that we do these plus an additional 1000g weight for Monthly QC only and check only 1 weight per day on each scale.

What are others doing?

Thanks.

[SOP for quarantine of previous donations.]

conwaysbb,

I'd be happy to share but...

Ours is very specific to our computer entered deferrals, and we currently have 1 SOP for each test. We are in the process of rewriting all of them into one comprehensive SOP.

So while you reinvent one wheel, we'll be busy working on the other. 8)

[Hello!]

Hi mfleach and welcome to the Donor Limits Forums.

Sheesh, I got tired just reading about all you have done!

How big is Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center? I am surprised you are going with a home-grown system still. Have you had concerns from FDA about it? We currently have a home grown, been using it for 20+ years. We are moving to a new system some time this year - or at least installing, then there is the obligatory 1+ year validation.

[Stem Cell Processing]

Hi diloro and welcome to the Donor Limits forums!

I am part of a large facility, and we have close relationships with the stem cell and gene manipulation lab. One of our donors centers also collects PBPC.

Feel free to post your questions, If I don't have the answers (and I probably won't :roll: ) then I'll contact some coworkers and have them post too.

[Could we have a forum related to regulatory issues (FDA)?]

Thanks for the suggestion Jane. I added a new section called Regulatory issues.

[recommend t-shirt supplier]

Hi Christine,

I've never used them, but their site is neat.

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/merchandise.aspx

[Not a new forum]

You can do that with this forum too.

Make sure you are logged in.

From any forum page look toward the top. You'll see a link "New Posts". Click that.

[Blood Bank or Pharmacy?]

1. Albumin - pharmacy

2. Clotting Factor concentrates - BB

3. Rh Immune Globulin-intramusular - BB

4. Rh Immube Globulin-intravenous (WinRho) - BB

5. IVIg - pharmacy

[Coolest program that remembers passwords]

I second this! I have been using it for a couple of years and even purchased it. The one drawback is when you are not on the computer it is installed on you forget passwords. :roll:

[Rh and K phenotyped units for women of child bearing age]

We are at a large facility and we are not doing this either.

[Forum]

Welcome Margaret. It looks like you were able to make your first post, so you're off on your way!

We are not affiliated with AABB. While their forum is helpful, it is very difficult to get to and navigate. We hope to offer Blood Bankers another way to communicate. Also, we require no membership fees. :wink:

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[Double RBCs from automated collection?]

I agree that would be nice. We also have a fairly active pheresis center and four Trima so we could do that but...

We have a home grown LIS and it can't handle that type of collections. We are in the process of negotiating a new system and it should be functioning mid next year. At that point we can consider this option and many more!

[National Blood Donor Month]

That sounds like a great idea.

We have two centers, one relatively small WB center and one fairly active plateletpheresis center. The platelet donors are very dedicated and it's hard to get them to not donate. The WB people are a bit tougher. I think food has worked well. We had a few days were the staff made homemade breakfasts cooked to order while you donated. It was a big hit.

[Double RBCs from automated collection?]

We are a large transfusion service with a smallish donor center. For us the staff is enthusiastic about using the device (we have one Haemonetics), but the criteria for the donors is a bit harder. Most women don't qualify and they make up the majority of our donors. Then there is HT increased time commitment. For me I actually prefer to donate this way, so then I have four months off between donations and don't need to feel guilty if I don't go every two months.

Plus the validation was time consuming. Not that it was a lot of work, but it took a long time with the frequency of the donors.

Are you using it now?