Tympanista

Both patients have afibrinogenemia. I am also curious as to why they are still receiving cryo, as opposed to a fibrinogen concentrate, but my pathologist is not very experienced when it comes to transfusion practices.

We spike a bag of saline to add to the pooling bag. I would love to switch to pre-pooled cryo, but our supplier only offers 5-pools, and the physician caring for our regular cryo patients insists on 6, 12, or 36 units, depending on the patient. : (

Is it standard procedure to add a small volume of saline when pooling cryo in order to aid with resuspension of the precipitate? At my previous job we did not add saline, but I just began working at a different hospital and their procedure calls for the addition of approx. 30mL of saline to the first bag. I'm not against the addition of the saline, but we have several patients who receive routine transfusions of cryo (up to 36 units at a time). Adding saline to the first bag and then using the contents of each subsequent bag to resuspend the next bag is very time consuming. The procedure at my previous employer was to just spike into each bag and drain as much of the contents into the transfer bag as possible. This was much less time consuming. Is the recovery of the precipitate significantly increased by the addition of saline and subsequent resuspension of each bag with the previous bag's contents (i.e. enough to justify the added time involved)? I'm just curious to hear what other facilities are doing.