I was curious if anyone would be willing to share how they handle unit recall notices from their blood supplier. We had some discussion regarding our process with our AABB inspector. I fear that we may be doing a bit of over-kill as a result.

Most of ours are just a preliminary recall - they usually don't turn into the full fledged look back involving sending the info to the physician and they in turn contact the patient and offer counceling and free testing (as appropriate) to the patient- with us documenting all of the above actions and sending a copy back to the blood supplier.

Usually, all we end up performing is a check for the unit - if it is still in inventory we discard it or if it is already, transfered, discarded or transfused we send notification of such actions to the blood supplier. At this point we do not notify the physician or patient unless further testing by the blood supplier indicated its necessity.

Hope I understood your question correctly.

Our pathologist sends a letter to the ordering physician with a copy of the recall/market withdrawal notice attached. The letter encourages the physician to call if there are any questions. I don't think we get more that one call per year.

We receive many recalls, most we choose not to notify on. For instance, the donor traveled to a malarial risk area - they don't necessarily have malaria, they just traveled, we don't notify. This is a documented decision by our medical director.

I am getting al lot of recalls. When a blood center notifies the hospital that a donor test reactive for HIV or HCV, do they perform a lookback on all donor blood products dating back 1 or 10 years? If so do they recall all blood products that are expired or just the in-dated products? If the donor confirm positive do you they notify the hospital about expired and / or in-dated products?