Baby Banker

The Blood Bank Manager and someone from Biomed have trained to be able to do some repairs. There is not a recurring cause of downtime.

We have one of each. The Rad Source is much more reliable. Also, it has it's own water supply which is recycled, so you don't need a water hook up, and it requires only a 220 power connection. Another plus is that it can irradiate 60 mL syringes. We're a pediatric hospital, so that is important for us. The company has been very responsive to the few issues that have come up. Having said that, no x-ray irradiator is as reliable as a cesium irradiator. They have a lot more working parts, so there is a lot more that can go wrong with them. Even though we have two x-ray irradiators, we have had them both down at one time.

positive: small dead space, very little wastage negative: can cause hemolysis if used with red cells

Thawing in cold water would probably cause the cryo to precipitate.

Who titres and who washes out of group platelets?

They will need a sterile connection device. We have two. We filter the platelets when we draw them up. A tube sealer would be handy too.

We used to reduce volume platelets here, but haven't done in years. It produced a substandard product. We use aliquots of apheresis platelets. They are usually in syringes. We have a neonatal ICU that stays full.

We tube units of blood only to our CV Lab, and we transfer them in the computer, so our documentation is the packing slip generated by the computer. It includes a statement: 'Acceptability confirmed and packed by: tech's user id.'

We have had a terrible time with the DI product, Instrument Manager. The Lantronix box has failed twice (the network guy didn't plug it into a surge protector), and the mapping is a pain, even with direct help from DI.

Most CAP and AABB inspectors know how ridiculous the differentiation between storage and transport is without a time limit for transport.

We have an SOP for when our system is down. The staff are trained on the other various scenarios, but there is no SOP. For example if the HIS is down we get paper orders. If the registration system is down, we can still use SafeTrace for any patient that was registered before the system went down. Any new patients have to be done on our down time records. If both the HIS and registration systems are down, we can still use SafeTrace for any patients registered before the down time began, AND we get paper orders.

We would wash them, but then our patients are pediatric.

Our policy allows for rule out with two heterozygous cells, but I've never been comfortable with that. I've seen antibodies that were negative with many, many heterozygous cells, but when you test them against a homozygous cell they react.

We use HemaTrax. It is easy to set up and use, and the same software is 'embedded' in SafeTrace.

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