Trek Tech

Thank you all for your good wishes! Our supplier is Florida's Blood Centers in Orlando Florida. We opened for business on August 18 and it feels great to be on the bench again..Whewww.. that was a long 6 months. I have never been off the bench for that length of time. Thanks again to BB Talk and my fellow blood bankers!

We charge the P9052 for the HLA-leukoreduced platelet pheresis. Our facility does the irradiation so we charge 86945 to cover the irradiation of the unit. I believe you can only charge for the irradiation if your facility performs it. I could be wrong.

John, We have a very large, active, Hematology/Oncology department. I would say the majority of the patients are from that area. They are multiply transfused and we have quite a few antibody patients. That area makes up about 99% of the transfusions. The others are from the G/I docs, internists and family practitioners. Our facility has about 120 physicians. Our fully accredited lab rivals the volume of a 350 bed hospital. Look for an article about us in the September issue of MLO!

I am pleased to announce that the physician's office laboratory where I am employed successfully passed inspection to open our blood bank. I had posted earlier in the year asking if anyone out there had ever seen or heard of a POL with a blood bank and received no responses. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to do so. Now we wait for our state license to be issued and we will be crossmatching and transfusing in our own office. Please, if anyone else knows of this happening any place else in the U.S. let me know. Thank you Blood Bank Talk for all of the advice I have sought while writing procedures! Thank you to all the blood bankers out there as well as your posts were invaluable.

Just testing out the forums posting options.

Have any of you heard of a (very large) POL with a transfusion service?

We had a patient in our ER who had a miscarriage. She was drawn for a blood type and she was B NEG. This did not match with our previous history of A Pos. She knew she would need rhogam and when she was confronted with the past history it came to light that she was using her friend's insurance card not realizing we had a history on her friend. She left AMA before giving her real identity and hopefully received rhogam elsewhere. Lesson: Never take a historical blood type for a rhogam work up.

Our policy is the same...one drop...transfused...exposed to donor.

During verifcation with the first set they sent we had one of our sickle cell patient's anti-E come up 1+ in the new formulation and negative in the old. He had not been demonstrating for about a year. We have had another patient's anti-K demonstrate again in the new formula! We have seen a difference!

Our blood supplier is currently deferring multiparous women as donors for plasma and/or platelets. This seems to be the easiest way to cut the risk dramatically.

Our facilities (3 hospitals) use only leukopoor single donor pheresis platelets. We do not accept platelets that are bloody. We have a standard which we compare our products against if there is doubt about RBC contamination. We have never found this to be an issue and this is the first time I have ever encountered this question. Am I missing something new?

Funny? Ok, maybe. Scary? Absolutely....Big Brother? Thanks for the post...I have forwarded it to some friends....

We currently give sickle patients C-,E-,K- units. This is only fairly successfull as other hospitals in our area do not give prophylactic, phenotypically matched units. We have provided phenotypically matched units for two of our sickle patients since they were small children and had been successfull at limiting exposure and antibody formation. All it took was an admission at a facility in our area that did not provide this service and one of them is now sensitized and has formed antibodies to Kell. We also check patients for little c antigen if they have formed anti-E. If they are negative for little c we provide R1R1 units. I believe it is easier to provide the little c negative units now rather than having to identify any other antibodies that may form after Anti-c. Once that anti-c has formed it can be difficult to find sufficient cells (in our facility) to rule out other antibodies. I would find it interesting to see what the current practices are in other transfusions centers. Some of my coworkers believe these practices are a waste of their time.

We report them as A. In our special needs field we instruct the techs to set up type O blood.

Hi Colleen, I actually have some personal experience with this. My oral surgeon gave me instructions prior to jaw surgery. The M.D. wanted me to store autologous cryo a month before surgery and an apheresis for platelets one or two days prior to surgery. This was to help control bleeding. He was shocked I knew what he was talking about. It was a good plan...if I had veins....the donor center asked me not to come back! You might be able to find information on an oral surgery or cosmetic facial surgery website. This is a very small town and I was amazed that a local doc was doing this 2 or 3 years ago.

Cliff, How about a name from the latin root words Sanguis Negotiator Dialectici? (not grammatically correct, just the root words). Although I doubt anyone would use any of those words in a search. This is a technical site for blood bankers.... my other ideas are too cutesy and I don't like them. Just a thought! Kim

1. Albumin- pharmacy 2. Clotting Factor concentrates- pharmacy 3. Rhig- IM- Blood Bank 4. WinRho-pharmacy 5. IVIg-pharmacy