Geri Bollman

Interesting. My lab director used those exact words, Staffing Benchmarks, yesterday. I did a search for staffing and hit this thread. We transfuse 1500-2500 units a month, nearly doubled from 2000, including approximately 60-100 infant aliquots. We are a trauma center, have over 800 deliveries a month, and have lots of oncology patients and ongoing 4-L plasmapheresis patients. Our MT staffing has not really changed for over 15 years and most of us are getting old and cranky. We have a few young MTs, but are afraid that they will burn out. In the last year we have added a second lab asst on days and one on PM shift. We have 3-4 MTs on days, 2 on PMs and one on night shift. We have 4 full time BBers on day shift, and generalists filling in the rest of the day shifts and the PM and night shifts. We have one Provue and another on the way. I oversee our BB, as well as 3 other hospital BBs, including the SOPs and QA. I bench quite a bit, am tasked with writing test plans to validate our new computer system, and cannot keep up, even though I work very long hours (salaried of course). My hope is that lots of you will respond that you have 3 times as much staff for this amount of work! Administration always considers lab as stepchildren. We are suppose to suck it up and stop whining.

our currrent lot of ortho 0.8% screening cell #2 is reacting with patients who also react with the BG+ cells on the panels, so i suspect there is some Bg on that cell. Are your speicmen centrifuges ancient? We had noisy old things and switched to Helmer Quikspins in April 2008. They spin plastic tubes in 2 minutes (8000g). they were such a morale booster for our BB after years of spinning for 7+ minutes in extremely noisy centrifuges.. I think that we have had less nuisance antibodiies because of the Quikspins.

the Quikspin from Helmer is wonderful. 2 minute spin for blood bank specimens (plastic tubes)

Most of our SOP's are online. We have 4 hospital transfusion services using the same SOP's, so by having them on the intranet, I know that an older version isn't in use at one of them. It helps that we have a document control wizard in charge of maintaining all the lab SOP's. When we revise or review, she posts the dates and revisions on the cover sheet of each SOP online. Monthly, she gives each lab department at each hospital an updated CD with the SOP's in case of downtime. Techs can print out copies for immediate use, but do not keep the copies. They can also click on a procedure and search for a word or phrase to find the mls or incubation time, etc. They can downsize the procedure so that they can use the computer for entering results, etc.

We use the QuikSpins from Helmer for spinning BB specimens. Platelet-poor plasma in 2 minutes. (plastic tubes only) They are small and quiet, and pretty affordable. We bought two approximately a year ago. Then we bought 3 more for Coag and the main lab because they work so well. They replaced these noisy old things from the 70's that took 7-10 minutes for BB specimens. What a morale booster for us all to have quiet and quick centrifuges after putting up with the noise and the delay in turn-around-time for all those years.

Since the D clone in gel is different than the D clones in the tube reagents, you will get variability of reactions. One of the most significant differences is partial D VI, which is negative in gel and immediate spin tube, and positive weak D with Ortho and Immucor tube reagents. Patients with partial D VI could make anti-D if transfused with D positive blood. At our facilities, when we switched to gel at 3 of our 4 sites, we dropped weak D testing. We found that some patients would test as D negative immediate spin, then D positive in gel the next day for the RhIg workup. Our solution: We test all immediate spin D negative patients either in gel or IAT. We use the gel result or the negative weak D as our test of record. If the patient tests as weak D positive, or has a history of weak D positive, we test them in gel and use the gel result as our test of record. We never accept weak D positive as a result. The gel D result or weak D negative result goes into their BB record and we do not need to do additional testing once recorded. For infants, we run tube testing IAT on all gel D negative cords, because we do not want to miss the partial D's. If weak D is positve, then mom is a RhIg candidate, KB stain instead of fetal screen (Yuk). However, the baby would be considered D negative is transfusion was required. D testing can be a pain, but our protocol seems to work for us.