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At my current hospital, if a blood product has been out of the department for more than 30 minutes, then we automatically discard it. This rule was also in effect at some other places I work at and no-one seems to know where the 30 minutes came from. Whenever I ask, I get "It's always been that way." Can anyone enlighten me? Thanks Tim

For platelet transfusion we only require a historical type. It doesn't matter if it was yesterday or 20 years ago. For FFP we require a type from the current admission.

Thanks for the response. I am going to check and see how many records we have. I am afraid its probably close to 300,000. Its amazing how much info can accumulate in 25 years. Thanks Tim

We are currently converting 20 plus years of Hemocare data into HCLL and the question I have is how many records should I check before I can say with confidence that all the data was converted. I originally thought that I would be OK if I checked 10 patients for each and every antibody and special instruction. But I have concerns about only checking 10 patients that have anti-K and assuming that the other 3,000+ patients with anti-K converted OK. I then thought that we should check 10% but to check 20 years of data could take me 20 more years, so logistically that's not going to happen. Has anyone out there had a similar problem? Thanks Tim