Blood Bank questions for entry into Meditech

[manager2013]

In your labs,  do you ask a question in your LIS for Blood Bank about a patient being “transfused in the previous 3 months or if female about their pregnancies? We have these questions in our Meditech 5.65 blood bank module. Is there a CAP or JC standard for these?

Just checking to see if we need to remove them, our physicians are complaining now that we have gone live with CPOE and they have to order tests. We feel like it is a best practice for patient safety.

Edited October 18, 2013 by manager2013

[Dansket]

The usual purpose of these questions is to determine if the specimen expiration date can be extended so that blood samples collected weeks prior to admission for surgery can be used for pretransfusion compatibility testing on the day of surgery.  If you don't have a program to use specimens with an extended expiration date, there is no requirement to do so.

 

From the 27th ed of the AABB standards (5.13.3.2), "If the patient has been transfused in the preceding 3 months with blood or a blood component containing allogeneic red cells, has been pregnant within the preceding 3 months, or if the history is uncertain or unavaliable, a sample shall be obtained from the patient within 3 days of the scheduled transfusion.  Day 0 is the day of draw."

[pbaker]

We only ask the questions of those folks that have had pretesting performed prior to surgery.   (we also ask about pregnancy)  If all was negative on pretest day and the answer to the questions is NO, then all we perform on day of surgery is an ABO/RH and use the antibody results from the pretest specimen.

 

We have had several training sessions with our surgery area reminding them of the utmost importance of correct answers to the questions.

[macarton]

We have a questionnaire form that patient's are asked during the pre-op interview.  We get that with the samples.  We use 7 days expiration if no transfusion or pregnancy.  In house we use the 3 day expiration.