Multiple tubes on one patient, what do you test?

[tar1heel]

If you have more than one tube submitted on a patient (for example, 3 microtainers on a child), after pooling the plasma, do you confirm the blood type on each of the tubes? Thanks for your answer!

Edited June 23, 2010 by tar1heel
left the word you out of title

[meshe]

Hi there!

At our facility we will test BT only if we will be using that tube for crossmatching. Also, when we don't pool plasma together. If we get 3 tubes, we will put each in it's own tube. We green dot the one where we haven't tested the BT. I respect everyone does it differently though! Feel free to ask anymore questions!

[adiescast]

We also would not pool the plasma. We store the three tubes together. If they are all labeled properly and from the same draw, I don't worry about which one I typed for microtainers on a neonate (since I will give type O cells anyway). For an older person, you might want to be sure you type the tube you crossmatch from, but you may not have enough sample to perform all testing from the same tube...so what if you screen one and crossmatch from another and they turn out to be different patients? I am not sure there is a foolproof way to get around this question.