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Thank you for sharing this Mabel! Sounds like your facility is in a similar boat as ours. By chance, are the units you provide ever returned to you if not used, prior to expiration? And do you ever accept them back into inventory for transfusion, or do you just discard them?

We do provide the units to the air ambulance. Patients transfused with those units can either get transferred to our facility, or another trauma center in the area. We keep segments aside of the units we give out and if they come to us we crossmatch but there is talk of removing that from the SOP. We feel uncomfortable with that because we cant find much information other than the FDA wants traceability and trackability of the unit. I feel like this situation is a black hole for units, not much information in the regulations/standards.

Hi All, I'm curious if anyone knows or can point me in the right direction regarding air ambulances and the responsibilities associated when units are transfused in-flight. Do those units need to be retroactively crossmatched by the facility receiving the patient? Or is there an exemption of some sort in these scenarios? Any info, documentation standards etc is greatly appreciated!

Hi all, this might be a long shot but does anyone have experience with Lexmark 2400 series? Our current issue is with printing component tags using Cerner Millennium. All of a sudden our printer has started to print a blank after each tag, and gets offset, it’s like the printer thinks the tag is longer than it should be. Our IS no longer services these kinds of printers 🙄 and the manual is unhelpful. Any ideas? Please 🙏🏻 And thank you

Thanks Malcom! I know A1 lectins need to be diluted properly but didn’t think it all the way through to that’s why A2 cells are a necessary negative control.

Hey all, I was wondering how you all QC your Anti-A1 lectin, particularly if you use commercial A2 red cells as your negative control. Background: We do not QC Anti-A1 lectin daily only as needed, we use commercial A1 red cells as our pos control, A2 as our neg. However, we then QC our A2 cells (bc they are not included in the QC of our daily rack QC) which I find to be unneccesary and wasteful. Why would you QC your QC? You are accessing the functionality of Anti-A1 not the A2 cells, right? Why not just use B cells if they have to be QC'd. Just curious if I am missing something. I am really wanting to get rid of this practice if possible, and I am currently going through CAP and AABB standards for clarity. Thanks

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In my experience with HTLA like antibodies you usually have a feeling to go that route by the way they shake off, they are generally weaker reactions and sometimes hard to reproduce. As Malcom has stated, I have heard strong Ch/Rg antibodies that need to be diluted out to neutralize. I personally like to do a titer, and I find that antibodies to Ch/Rg usually like gel. But that's when they place nice... Hope that was helpful

Thank you Malcolm. Our prenatal titer procedure calls for reading microscopic solely for the purpose of scoring, but I guess there isn't an associated score . Looks like the procedure should be updated

How about microscopic reactions for scoring prenatal titers? The tech manual scoring guide has +/- as a score of 2. Would you interpret the tech manual as meaning that +/- is microscopic positive or macro weakly positive?

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Do you use Rhophylac? In the package insert it says, "Rhophylac® can contain antibodies to other Rh antigens (e.g., anti-C antibodies), which might be detected by sensitive serological tests following administration"

Thank you Malcom, that was a good explanation. Its funny that you said the human eye is not always accurate because one of the blood bankers told me they eyeball it, and I said the same exact thing that you said. How do you eyeball a 0.8% suspension?!

Unfortunately, yes. We recently had to register for the same reason. If you mix two different products you are essentially making a new product (or at least I was told). We even emailed AABB to confirm and they said yes.

Thanks everyone! Im actually relieved bc I can just tell them not to wash and it'll be an easy fix. We do use that calculation to make the 0.8% from packed cells, the problem is that people are washing the cord blood four times in the cell washer and it doesn't leave enough red cells to get 10 microliters of true packed cells. Anorris, page 377 last paragraph.