Hello Everyone,

I am looking for a reference on expiration of reconstituted whole blood. The Technical Manual (18th Edition) discusses it briefly on page 224 and states that "following reconstitution, the product can be stored at 1 to 6 C for up to 24 hours." If a closed system (sterile welder) is used for attaching packed red cells to plasma, and thawed plasma (5 day expiration) is used, can that 24 hours be extended?

Thanks much,

Heather

We use the 24 hours regardless of how the red cell was entered (sterile connection device or spiking unit).  I hadn't really considered the possibility of extending to 5 days with the use of thawed plasma.  I will also be interested to hear if anyone else is doing this.

Stephanie

Most of our reconstituted whole blood is made using washed RBCs (to remove the residual anti-A/anti-B/anti-A,B), which necessitates the 24 hour outdate.

On May 23, 2017 at 6:45 AM, heathervaught said:

Most of our reconstituted whole blood is made using washed RBCs (to remove the residual anti-A/anti-B/anti-A,B), which necessitates the 24 hour outdate.

Same here.

Just revisiting this to see if anyone else can share a reference with me...

My feeling on this matter is:  would you reconstitute with thawed plasma rather than thawed FFP?  I think that if you are using FFP that 24 hrs should be the exp date.  I've never heard that anyone has used thawed plasma, so . . .

We won't transfused neonates with thawed plasma (5 day) so we don't reconstitute with it either.

We use only thawed plasma for all patients (including for reconstitution). We have always spiked the red cell bag to add the thawed plasma so expiration was 24 hours from that time. Recently we started sterile welding the red cells and thawed plasma bags so are wondering if we could extend expiration of the reconstituted whole blood to the thawed plasma expiration date.