Frances Haas

We had a case like this here a few years ago. I don't remember all of the details, but it was scary because we had transfused her and at first thought it was a transfusion reaction.

We average about 1 FMH per day and some of those are sent in to us. Of those, We had about 9 positive last year. We did 76 KB stains last year with about half of them positive. We don't have the staff to do them on the night shift. KB stains are not offered stat unless the woman is in a trauma situation.

We do the FMH and the KB in Blood Bank. We also issue the RhoGam.

We buy our units from United Blood Services and do the ABO recheck upon delivery into our stock. That takes care of any worry about incorrectly labeled units.

We are doing electronic crossmatches. We have Soft and it does not allow selection of ABO incompatible units. This feels like a step backwards.

We buy our products from UBS and we did use the 7 day shelf life platelets. UBS decided to go the safest route and get and go back to a 5 day shelf life. I understand the concern, but the longer shelf life was worked very well for us. We all liked it and no patient had adverse affects from these platelets.

We will be going to change over to Epic also. We have SoftBank (have had it for years) so I am interested in hearing how it works for you, Terri.

We also use an overwrap bag in our open system. This should protect against leakage andand protect the plasma from contaminants. When the water was contaminated once a few years ago, the odor got fishy quickly.

We have seen that with patient having protien problems. We use gel for the most part now, but PeG was our enhancement for years. We even saw flocullence in some samples as soon as we added PeG. On those samples, we used LISS because the extra washes didn't always work.

We do the same as clmergen. The bags of segments are kept for 6 weeks, then thrown away. We have to look once a year at the most. We buy our blood products from UBS, so we can also request a segment from them.

:frown:We used to charge per antigen per unit. We found out at that, to be compliant with billing, we could have one charge for each unit, no matter how many antigens.