angie

Thanks for the response David. Shortage rate would be a performance indicator for a blood centre but is there any guidelines regarding the measurement? If a patient is given compatible but non group specific blood would that count as shortage? If a hospital blood bank is able to outsource a particular required group and provide it for an elective surgery would that count towards shortage? We have a predominantly decentralized hospital based bloodbanking system in our country hence each blood bank is involved in collecting, processing and issuing blood.

How does one collect data for blood shortage at a hospital blood centre? Would you include the no. of blood requests deferred / no. of patients issued blood after switching groups or type,/ patients issued blood after having to borrow blood from another blood centre ? Would you consider the the number of patients or the number of units for calculation of shortage of blood on any particular day?

It is the physician who decides to transfude a blood or blood component so s/he should be responsible for obtaining the informed consent from the patient. Why is a blood transfusion service supposed to obtain consent? Who is responsible for maintaining the record of the consent documentation ?

I prefer the present name or Transfusion talk.

Ours is a hospital based blood bank. We always give ABO matched platelets to our patients. In case of apheresis platelets they are Rh matched. We normally have directed plateletpheresis donors so this takes taken care of. Problem occurs only in case of emergency cases where it may not be possible to get a ABO/Rh matched plt donor for pheresis . Random small units of ABO plts are being given in these cases with advice Rh Ig in case pt is Rh neg.

We issue only ABO Group specific pheresis platelet at our cardi neuro centre.

ECL is not mentioned as such in the regulations. Only ELISA or "similar such tests" is mentioned . Many licensed pvt blood banks R using ECL in India but most Govt run blood banks use ELISA

Enhanced Chemiluminescence test (ECL) vs ELISA for TTI What is your take on this? ECL test gives rsult within 1-2 hrs whereas ELISA takes about 4 hrs. There are claims that ECL has been able to pickup some positive samples that were missed by NAT (nucleic amplification test) . I would like to know your views regarding suitability of ECL vs ELISA in a blood bank.

ooops, I noticed the date much after I had posted

We have a double bid system while procuring our items. Once we approve a bid on technical grounds, the price bids R opened & the lowest quoted is usually selected afterfurther price negotiations. In our case if we had technically approved JMS & Terumo then both wud B eligible for price bid & lower bid of the two wud get selected.

Perhaps posting this in the vendor section may get better responses. We are using floor model Cryfuge 6000i, not using any table top model.

This is the procedure followed in our hospital too.

Is this problem observed only with ortho gel cards or also with diamed too. Is the solid phase grp system like Galileo better than the gel cards? looking forward to ur opinion.

Thanx for replying. The Diamed system is slower than the Ortho but has more security features. I wonder if the glass bead & gel medium make any significant difference in the result.

Thanx Rashmi, Eric & aakupaku for the welcum . The various feedbacks that we get here are a GR8 help ! Thank you Cliff for this wonderful forum !