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Massive Transfusion - who do you call for additional help?


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Massive Transfusion - who do you call for additional help?  

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  1. 1. At your hospital, who do you call when you need additional employees in the blood bank during a Massive Transfusion event?

    • We handle these with the staff we have on at the time. We can sometimes pull from other departments if needed.
    • We always call the blood bank supervisor to come in to help, if they are not present at the time.
    • We have a call system where we call certain staff members based on a call schedule.
    • We call the blood bank supervisor and additional staff members if needed.
    • It's really a combination of all of these - depending on how it goes.
    • None of the above - please elaborate below.


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At your hospital, who do you call when you need additional employees in the blood bank during a Massive Transfusion event? 

Just looking to see what other facilities are doing. We are only an 80 bed hospital, so we don't get a lot of these. But I'd like to hear what larger facilities and trauma centers do as well. Thanks!

Edited by bowerj1
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2 hours ago, bowerj1 said:

At your hospital, who do you call when you need additional employees in the blood bank during a Massive Transfusion event? 

Just looking to see what other facilities are doing. We are only an 80 bed hospital, so we don't get a lot of these. But I'd like to hear what larger facilities and trauma centers do as well. Thanks!

Particularly if the massive transfusion event is a major incident, and during a time when there is only a minimum number of people working, we used to have a list of telephone numbers for, primarily, people who work in blood transfusion, but also those who work in blood transfusion as a sort of secondary discipline, and we give this to the microbiologist to contact the required number of staff (on the grounds that the microbiologist, brilliant in their own discipline as they may be, are less likely to be of use in the Blood Bank when units are required urgently, than are the staff who are already running around like headless chickens).

I was lucky enough (????????) to be involved with three IRA bombs and two train crashes in my time - and the system did work.

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~850 bed hospital here. If it's around shift change, normally the previous shift has a few techs stay to help with the need. Otherwise, you kind of deal with the traumas as they go and with the staff you have. As a safety net, if it's an off-shift, we do have a supervisor on call. We honestly seem to have at least one MTP a week, supplied by a minimum of at least 3(ish) techs.

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We are around 100 beds...We have 1 blood bank tech on days and afternoons, and 2 techs for the lab on midnights. The plan is to notify the shift lead of the Massive Transfusion who will assign a 2nd tech for blood bank to assist. For midnights & weekends, we have a list of the blood bank tech phone numbers to call. We have 2-3 MTP events a year.

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Just curious but are you referring to a single patient massive transfusion or a mass casualty situation?  I would classify Malcom's examples as mass casualty while a single patient massive transfusion could be the result of any number of things.  Then there is everything in between.  In the two facilities (both approximately 350 beds) I supervised I left it up to the staff involved to decide what and when they needed help.  When help was required I was usually the first one called.  Even got a call while fishing in Alaska once.  Wasn't much help with that one.  :coffeecup:

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I am the blood bank supervisor in a 233 bed acute care facility.  I am a working supervisor.  We are not a trauma center.  Most days, I am the only blood banker on the shift, so there is no one to call.  If I am lucky, the chemistry tech might be available to help. I can also get the manager to issue blood, but that's all.  We rarely have MTPs - a ruptured AAA or OB bleed, but they are few and far between.

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On ‎8‎/‎24‎/‎2019 at 9:32 AM, Malcolm Needs said:

Yes John, I was definitely talking about a mass casualty situation.

In that case, we had a bombing that happened to be at shift change, so we had two shifts worth of techs. You didn't want too* many techs at once, because then it turns into a "too many cooks in the kitchen" sort of deal, but plenty from the first shift stayed, and the second shift was arriving. They didn't call in many extraneous people because they had no idea how long it would last, and you'd need staffing for after the initial rush. That being said, there were plenty of staff, and the supervisors were helping on the floor. Our blood supplier even called and offered to ship blood. In reality you only need 2-3 people to handle an MTP if your inventory is set, but in a situation where you have dozens of bleeders and the inventory needs to be maintained, everyone has a job to do. Again, large trauma hospital here.

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365 bed trauma center that pulls staff from the other departments if needed although during a massive the hem/coag needs to be staffed too.  If another body is needed a call would go out to someone close to the hospital and works in the blood bank. Fortuanately, we have not had anything the staff couldn't handle and not problem in the rare occassion to get a body in.

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We are a 540-bed Hospital functioning as a Level I Trauma Center. I need help with setting up an MTP for infants and small children. Recently we had a two-year-old who had been hit by a car. They could not use the rapid infuser on her because it would be too much too fast for her weight (which I don’t remember)so they pulled blood from the bags with syringes and pushed it in. The trauma team is asking me what supplies they need to handle pediatric traumas. All we have are syringes with an in-line filter that we aliquot for our NICU babies. How do others handle small pediatric patients? Do the nurses use syringes to pull and push the blood as I have described? Is that allowed? I’m pretty sure there was no filter involved either. Is there such a thing as a syringe blood warmer? So far we have only had older children and adults for MTPs and we have a good process in place—just need to provide for the smaller patients too.

Thank you for any suggestions/recommendations.

Kathryn

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If it occurs on day shift or 3-11 we will pull from other departments if needed.  If it occurs on 11-7 shift usually a phone call is made to a tech who lives the closest, we do have a call tree that would activate everyone but that should not be necessary. They often call the BB Lead (me) but usually is not requested to come in, unless working that morning and coming in early.

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23 hours ago, bldbnkr said:

If it occurs on day shift or 3-11 we will pull from other departments if needed.  If it occurs on 11-7 shift usually a phone call is made to a tech who lives the closest, we do have a call tree that would activate everyone but that should not be necessary. They often call the BB Lead (me) but usually is not requested to come in, unless working that morning and coming in early.

That's pretty much what we do.

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