davisco

Is putting a pool of thawed cryo on your counter waiting for the floor/OR to come and pick it up considered "storage in an open storage area" in anyone's opinion? And for those of you without temperature monitoring systems capturing your room temps, do you document your room temps every 4 hours? Looking for some opinions.:surrender

Cerner has a Label Verify function, but we have a log for use in the event the computer is down, which is described in a dowtime SOP.

Our back-up method is gel for ABID. When we performed our validation testing, we did not find clinically significant antibodies on the ECHO that manual gel did not, however, we did find less cold antibodies, Lewis Abs, anti-M's, and many fewer Anti-D's from RhIg prophylaxsis. We have also picked up warm autos on the ECHO that had negative ABSC in gel and in LISS/tube. Immucor's current Ready-ID panel is making us a little crazy with the Bg pos cell on the panel also being Cw pos and Kpa pos, but other than this, we have been very happy with our ECHO and the techs like it very much.

Hello to all...not a regular poster, but was wondering if those of you who have been in the trenches already validating your ECHOs would be willing to share any woulda/shoulda/coulda moments with us. We just finished training, have all the books, and we received some tips from our rep re: freezing samples for parallels, screen dumping, and recommendation against spiking samples with reagent antisera. Did any of you try this, or come across any specific things you "wish you had known beforehand" that may have sped up the process or made it more organized, etc?

Hello to all...not a regular poster, but was wondering if those of you who have been in the trenches validating your ECHOs would be interested in sharing some tips...like, the "I wish I had known/done..." types of things. We have the books, just finished training, and we did talk with our reps about freezing samples for parallel testing, screen dumping, etc. Just wondering if you found any "shoulda/woulda/coulda" moments during the process you might be willing to share having already been there/done that. Also, I know it won't always work, but just curious if anyone did try to spike samples with rgt antisera to make positive ABSCs for validation.

Thanks for your replies... We were given a Phase II by CAP for not doing them daily. However, in the manual, it is recommended that you ensure the RPMs are correct and your timer counts down as part of daily QC. It does not say you need to do a tach and timer check, just a visual. Just a warning that you may want to document this visual check somewhere if you are not already.

Do all of you using MTS gel cards and centrifuges perform DAILY tach/timer checks on your centrifuges? We have been doing tach/timer checks quarterly, but apparently they are required daily?

I seem to remember an ER episode where a boy's long-lost genetic father was relocated and they transfused the boy with the rare type directly from his dad's arm! Pretty funny...I think 3 or 4 of us actually were on the phone calling each other.