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Red Cross changes 12/16


Mabel Adams

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In our institution the most inappropriate use of group O cells is for trauma patients where we haven't received a sample so that we can switch patients to their own ABO type.  We exhort our trauma team to send the first sample they send to us.  ABO mismatched red cells is a suboptimal use of group O red cells, and in the long run, probably harms patients. We switch patients as soon as we can when they are A, B or AB to their own red cell type.  I know there are some old dogmas that you should keep patients on group O once you've started. No data whatever to support that, practice some data suggesting it's harmful and it's obviously terrible for the supply of group O red cells.

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On 12/8/2021 at 11:03 AM, AMcCord said:

Just got a call from our rep - ARC nationally is going to start allocating O pos and O neg red cells. It will be based on your facility usage pattern and may be updated weekly. Donations are tanking and they are having staffing issues, as we all are.

Same for us.  We had two calls with ARC this week.  Our standing order is about 100 units a day, plus we have a donor center, so this will affect us a lot.

So far, we've been fortunate that we've not cancelled and procedures or limited our cancer patients.  We transfuse about 35k RBCs a year, so yes, we're concerned.

They were cutting us about 50% for a while this summer and we made it.  These cuts are planned to be around 30%, so hopefully it's more chicken little stories.

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On 12/9/2021 at 8:34 AM, Neil Blumberg said:

I know there are some old dogmas that you should keep patients on group O once you've started. No data whatever to support that, practice some data suggesting it's harmful and it's obviously terrible for the supply of group O red cells.

this stems from "the old days" prior to AS rbcs due to the amount of residual plasma in the units.  It is a moot point since the additive solution age began as residual plasma is negligble.

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