John C. Staley

And now you are beginning to achieve enlightenment.

Wow, just wow. I can't even imagine a blood banker in the US considering this as acceptable. Our usual assumption has always been, if we didn't do it then it's probably wrong. Our paranoia runs deep and swift. Now, before anyone gets too upset with me please know that I was one of you for 35 years so I can play the what if game with the best of you. I'm just noting what I observed over many years. If anyone in the US is actually accepting the results from other facilities at face value and acting on them, please let me know, I would love to be wrong.

Sounds to me like an inspector who is "uncomfortable" because it's not how they do it. I recommend a nod and smile and a comment such as, "We'll look into it." As long as who is doing it, are trained and competency is documented it should not matter which department is doing it. To rephrase what Malcolm said, the procedure is more in haematology's wheel house. (It's kind of fun spelling words with more letters than necessary!)

If the cancer center does not have a blood bank refrigerator for storage and the blood will remain in the bags until used I recommend validating them as storage devices and not transport devices. This could save you some future headaches. This has been an issue for as long as I can remember.

That doesn't make any sense to me but I've been out of the loop for awhile. Is the outpatient surgery center a "stand alone" facility separate from the hospital or is it incorporated into the hospital? I'm not sure if that would make a difference, just a thought. It still would not make sense to me to have two separate but identical procedures on file. Do you have a good enough working relationship with your pathologist that you could ask him to explain his thinking to you? I've had at least one medical director that I would not even consider questioning but on the flip side, I've had

Somebody was sure digging through the archives to find this one! Glad to see. This was probably one of my first posts. To be honest, I don't remember if we ever went with the second type but I imagine we did knowing the corporate QA team at the time. I do believe that anything short of a second draw is little more than smoke and mirrors to show compliance with some mandate.

That's a new one to me. I'm with Kelly, positive is positive as long as it matches the forward type. If not, let the investigation begin!

Personally I don't see a problem here but I sure can't site any regulations, rules or even precedence that would help. Of course it bothers all the blood bankers, I would be very surprised if it didn't. It involves a change and that always makes us uncomfortable. I suggest sitting down and trying to come up with what, exactly, makes everyone uncomfortable if you haven't already. Then weigh those concerns on the real vs imagined scale and see what you come up with. Just thoughts from an old guy that's been there.

At one of my facilities we had a group of O neg donors that would come in on a regular basis and these folks were designated as out Neonate Donors. I think at the time we would set them aside exclusively for the neonates for a week and if they were not needed during that week we would move them to the general population. We would ask regular O neg donors if they could come in on a schedule so they could be used for the babies. When most understood that their blood would be designated for the newborns little else had to be said to get them on board.

Just a thought. With an issue like this you have to come to a point of realizing that you can only do so much especially when much of the process is out of your control. You can drive yourself crazy playing the "what if " game! Once you've done the best you can for your situation then accept that there will probably be a fallible human somewhere in the process who will come up with a creative work around. A nurse will put a unit in the medication refrigerator until she's ready for it or they will put it back in the cooler in OR after it's been setting next to the patient during the procedu

Interesting topic, we had a 32 bed NICU and I don't remember ever transfusing platelets. I'll be interested in any responses.

I used something similar but about 30 years older!!! Glad to see it's been up graded. I had a number of inspectors that did not like it because they had never seen anything like it. They couldn't say to much about it, I had all the records showing it was verified just like all the rest of my thermometers on the same schedule.

I've been searching for the powerpoint I made of the occurrence I wanted to share but I must have stored it on an external hard drive that crashed and was unrecoverable. (That's my excuse anyway.) Consequently it was long ago and my memory is fuzzy on the details but in this case the details is not the point I'm attempting to convey. Bottom line was that 2 units of blood were sent via pneumatic tube to ICU for 2 different patients. No, the units were not in the same tube, they were sent 10-15 minutes apart. The units went to the wrong patients and the proper patient identification protocol

It's good to be famous and remembered!!

When tube testing was all we had, my moto was; "when in doubt, shake it out!" One of the first things I did as transfusion supervisor at a new facility was convince the medical director that we needed to stop using the microscope for routine testing. It was much harder to convince the rest of the staff. I couldn't remove the microscopes from the department because we were doing KBs at the time and I'm pretty sure a few of the "older" staff still used them for routine testing when I wasn't looking. Once again inertia is proven to be the most powerful force in the universe!