MARINA

From a generalist stand (whose main love is blood bank) I LOVE IT! It would be wonderful to hear news and views from techs in the other areas of the clinical world.

We use a regular scanner with our LIS that allows us to scan into the nurses charting module. We still keep the paper documents in storage off-site.

Previous hospital had a field to mark history check yes or no. Current hospital has us look up history and physically write it on the order that printed out and initial.

Under 2 years old, pregnancy and bone marrow patients always have their RH negative status matched. Sometimes the pathologist has requested matching RH over type.

For many years we went by the Historical type. In the last few years there has been several issues of patients using another's insurance card. We have caught these by performing the type.

Same as adiescast. We start with the freshest unit available, usually two days old. It gets used rather quickly by the same baby or the baby only needs one dose and then we start another baby on the unit to use it up.

We sterile dock syringe and give 24 hour expiration date to RBC and 4 hours to platelets.

Hello, I am in a statistics class and we are using statistics from work for a cost analysis paper. I am comparing the manual tube blood banking to the Immucor Echo. I am needed some TAT statisitcs for the Echo. I am trying to perform an ANOVA calculation, but only have pre-analyzer statistics. Is there a vendor out there that could share Echo TAT statistics. I know there is a consistent TAT for a type and screen, but I need real numbers to plug into the excel worksheet. Please attach a link or I can send you my email.

Another option (if the platelet count has been verified by smear and citrate tube) is a Heparin Induced Thrombocytopenia. Is the patient a post operative from somewhere? Have they been exposed to heparin? This is a quick serological test many hospitals do. Sometimes this antibody shows up in four days, but it could take up to a couple of months!

We switched to plastic a few years ago. It was a decision made by administration to cut cost on sharps disposal. We were resistant, but it worked out ok, since we primarily use a Galileo now and just use tubes for more specific testing, etc. We have had no significant issues with panels, etc. However, ee do keep glass tubes in stck for fetal screens checks under the microscope, plastic tubes do not work at all for this.

1. Albumin - Just changed to pharmacy in the last year due to billing concerns. 2. Clotting factor concentrates - Pharmacy 3. Rh Immune Globulin-intramuscular - Blood Bank 4. Rh Immune Globulin-intravenous (WinRho) - Blood Bank, just moved to blood bank in the last year, so that we could track the patients that received this.

Here is the link. The supply a box of 250 for approximately $100. They have pictures of the armband. You can also google search "Soft-lock Colorguard" and it brings up multiple suppliers. Sorry took so long! http://www.cardinal.com/us/en/distributedproducts/ASP/01-0651W.asp?cat=surgerycenter

I do not know of any compliance issue on this subject. BUT, I have personally seen a nurse drop a unit in an elevator and cause quite a commotion with decontamination with our infection control team. One of our main employee elevators was out of us for several hours! I think it is a good preventative measure to prevent any large biohazard spill.

This same thing happened to us recently. Nursing explained to us about the sterile conditions for the patient during the procedure, they showed us a clear armband sleeve that the original blood bank armband slides into. These have more secure latches. Nursing replaces the armband after the procedure and it usually works out well. We rarely have an instance where the patient has returned to their room wothout the armband on.

We have had the Galileo for over two years and had this same experience right off the bat! Our decision was to manually tube type the D unless there was already a manual result to verifiy the analyzer. Initially everyone huffed about this new rule, since we have automation, no one should have to verify the analyzer. But it is quite fast and we don't even think about it anymore.

We are a small blood bank that supplies only one type of FFP to the patients in our facility. Is is necessary to have another tech check the product before permanently placing the Thawed FFP label over the original frozen plasma label? We are CAP, but not FDA or AABB inspected.

Does anyone out there state in their SOP's about an alternative to AB patients when giving FFP. This would be in an emergency situation when we are out of AB FFP and our supplier is also. Do you state the ability to give alternate types when you have started to switch the type for packed cells?

We are a large cancer treatment hospital. We only send out warms. We do not re-antigen type units. I would be interested in seeing JCAHO requirement to reantigen type units from our reference lab. We did reantigen type units years ago and stopped this practice because of time, cost and redundancy.

Immucor is currently having an issue providing Platinum Service to our blood bank !!! When they do show up to service our Galileo, they are not as informed about the instrument as our techs are. It is a great instrument, though! It has saved us alot of tech time and keeps us free to take care of other things. We previously had the ABS 2000 and it did a great job as well. We are a bust facility and needed a random access analyzer.

We have an Icon to "Generate Tags and Labes". In this section you can check the box that says "Emergency Tag" you can either assign it to a specific patient (with a MR# on file) or free text a patien't name.. John Doe. This function gives you all the cautionary info for the doctor to sign on the bagtag. we have also gone through this function to print out blank emergency release tags that are ready for us to fill out by hand, but we tend to only use these during downtime emergencies.