Hello Blood Bankers! I have been reading this wonderful forum for a few years but today I'm posting for the first time! I work in a large hospital transfusion service and we've had some interesting cases lately which have led to many discussions about obtaining accurate and timely transfusion histories. We've had a few patients who we've never seen before, but later find out they've been patients in other local hospitals and have an antibody that we didn't detect. Or we detect two antibodies, call our local reference lab for antigen negative units and when we tell them the patient's name, they tell us our patient has more than just those two antibodies. So what does your facility do? Do you routinely get a transfusion history on all potential recipients? Only when you detect an antibody? What about those patients whose titers have dropped below detectable levels? I know we can't catch them all but it seems like there has to be something we can do short of creating a National Antibody database. Oh, and why don't we have one of those? Many thanks in advance, Janice
