We have an active 36 bed NICU. We do not have an irradiator and are located between 2 and 4 hours (depends on traffic) from the blood center. We keep 1 O neg, 1 O pos, 1 A neg & 1 A pos irradiated units available for NICU at all times. After about 1 week on the shelf they are moved into the general population. Once a baby is assigned to a unit during that first week we will give the baby aliquots from that unit until the unit is depleted, outdated or the baby leaves the hospital. We seldom are tranfusing from a unit that is approaching it's outdate. Most of the time the baby has stopped receiving blood long before that but we will use it up to the outdate and have not been informed of any problems from the physicians. Our neonatologists are very conservative with their transfusions and with the use of erythropoeitin(sp) our transfusions of have dropped dramatically. Cliff, where's the spell checker?