Shashah

We are trying to see if other hospitals routinely perform titers-- either Isoagglutinin titers (for example, a recent patient receiving a mismatched BMT, our medical director wanted us to titer the patient's Anti-B before and after the transplant until it disappeared) and/or Antibody titers in pregnant women with CSA's. We routinely do OB Antibody titers and have just seen an increase in Isoagglutinin titers, and we were wondering what this information is actually used for, ie if they are really necessary or don't need to be done as often as they are ordered here at our facility. What are your experiences with this, if any?

Just wanted to know if anyone has ever heard of food graded transfusion labels. We have been using the same blood tags for last 3 years, they have these green labels which we peel off and put on the unit itself. These green labels are all of a sudden considered not food graded????? Not sure what that means. We had two inspectors come into our facility and told us that we are no longer allowed to put place these green labels directly onto the unit. We can however put it on the ISBT label but typically there is no space on these labels. We are trying to come up with a solution. It would be a real pain to put tie tags on these units since we have large volume of transfusions. Please advise on this situation. Any recommendation would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Sha Shah

Thanks everyone for your comments. This will really help us present our case for wanted to stop doing cold screens. I will let you all know how it goes.

Need some advice on benchmarking. We have been doing cold screens forever and our blood bank action team is working on getting rid of it. Right now, we do it on all our open heart patients who are on pumps. The team was asked to gather information on why this might not be a neccesary test. Then we can present this data to the surgery team and hopefully eliminate the testing. We have called around to other hospitals and it looks like none of the big trauma hospitals are doing cold screens. Wondering if anyone else out there can help us in gathering our data. Any suggestions/ comments will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Blood Bank Action Team from VA.