I'm looking at my RBC inventory levels...something that I haven't done since I started here a year and a half ago (and goodness only knows when it was last reviewed before then).  Can you all please tell me what you currently do?

We keep 4 days worth of blood on our shelves. Our blood supplier looks at our last 6 months of transfusions and works with us to set par levels to ensure we have the 4 days of blood and are not returning too many RBCs due to short dates.

We utilize the National Blood Exchange and not our local supplier.  The upside is financial and more group O's, the downside is blood is flown in from various suppliers and we carry a slightly larger inventory than expected for our size.  Setting our target inventory range, I looked at usage over the last year by blood group.  We are a major trauma service, so we use disproportionate group O's.  We need to have enough O's for 3 major traumas at any given time, so we set our O inventory based on that.  Then we set the range for other blood groups. 

We keep a 5 day red cell blood supply on the shelf. Our blood supplier sets the inventory levels annually based on the previous 12 months utilization. We are approximately 30 minutes from our blood supplier. They stock us daily M-F and then we can submit requests 24/7 if we have a need.