What the validity of packed red blood cells in the syringe?

[mpmiola]

I'm having doubts about the validity of the blood in the syringe for pediatric transfusions. 

We use a protocol, valid for 4 hours. 

What the best practicing...

[R1R2]

I don't think there is a best practice.   I have seen it work using either syringe or bag, although I have had problems with syringes leaking during transport.   

[Eagle Eye]

Manufact. Recommendation is 24 hrs expiration that's what we use.

We tighten the syringe since we had the accident

[mpmiola]

Our practice is 4 hours. Would like another option for not having to keep sending in syringe ...

[tbostock]

We use syringes and have no problem with them leaking. We do hand deliver them to the NICU (we don't send these through the pneumatic tube). The nurses like them because they can "lock and load them" right into the syringe pump.

[R1R2]

Our practice is 4 hours. Would like another option for not having to keep sending in syringe ...

We routinely use pedi paks.   THe only draw back is that we have to allow extra volume for tubing (about 30 mL) so a lot of product is (basically) wasted.   I don't think that a lot of extra volume is required for syringes.   

[BB479]

We use a 4 hour expiration for the syringes.

 

One big advantage of the syringes over bags is that the neonatal syringes filter the units during the aliquoting process.  It is a smaller sized filter than the one in a blood administration set so less blood is "lost" to the filtering process.

 

We discovered that when we sent blood in bags rather than in syringes, the nursery did not realize that they needed to use a standard blood administration set with filter so they were skipping that important process during the blood adminsitration process.   (There are pedi sized blood admin sets available for smaller volumes than the adult sets.   Our intensive care nursery now stocks the pedi sized blood admin set for times when blood products are issued in bags.)

 

[R1R2]

We use a 4 hour expiration for the syringes.

 

One big advantage of the syringes over bags is that the neonatal syringes filter the units during the aliquoting process.  It is a smaller sized filter than the one in a blood administration set so less blood is "lost" to the filtering process.

 

We discovered that when we sent blood in bags rather than in syringes, the nursery did not realize that they needed to use a standard blood administration set with filter so they were skipping that important process during the blood adminsitration process.   (There are pedi sized blood admin sets available for smaller volumes than the adult sets.   Our intensive care nursery now stocks the pedi sized blood admin set for times when blood products are issued in bags.)

what pedi sized blood admin set are you using?

[mewilde1]

During an FDA inspection at another facility (2011) we were cited for using a 24 hour outdate.  The then current Technical Manual listed this change, but there was no real notification of this change that I was aware of.  The FDA inspector was well-versed in this change and we changed our policy to 4 hour outdates for all blood products in a syringe.

 

You can find it in the 16th Edition on page 294 under Aliquoting:  "Cellular components stored in syringes have an expiration of 4 hours, but if stored in an FDA-approved transfer bag, the expiration remains the same as that of the "mother" unit.