I would be interested in hearing what percentage of plateletpheresis expire inother Blood Banks with a Open Heart program. Our percentage is 45% wasted.

We don't use a lot of plateletpheresis products. We use mostly random donors and we do waste quite a few. We have an open heart program and we are a level 2 trauma center so we are supposed to keep 10 randoms at all times. When we have a heart scheduled we do bring in extra platelets but they don't always use them. Our wastage was higher over the holidays but now we are at the point where we can't keep platelets on the rotator. I think it would break my heart to waste a pheresis, they are so expensive.

We are required to stock platelets on-site for our Open Heart program, so we're outdating 50% of apheresis units, since we don't have an Oncology program to keep our stock moving.

Discards approach 100% over weekends ...

We have a relatively new open heart program at the facility that I work so we havent yet gotten this down to a fine art. But I can say that they dont require us to have platelets on hand unless there is something that makes the dr think it will be necessary such as Plavix being administered. We have several surgeries that go really well and use no platelets and then we may have one go bad. So for the next few cases they will over order and we lose a bunch and then they calm down and quit ordering them. One weekend in December we lost 6! Of course we have a newly opened Cancer Center so we can use some that the open hearts dont use on our oncology patients and as the cancer center gets more patients that will probably be even more true. But all together I would estimate our wastage at around 40%.

We waste between 15 and 20 percent annually. We have an active oncology program, so we stock 9 pheresis at all times anyway. We are also a level one trauma center.

We outdate about 20% annually. We have an active heart program and are required to have plts available at all times. We also have an oncology program but it's not really active enough to count on using short dating plts. As a general rule we have 1 A and 1 O plt apheresis on the rotator along with an AB irradiated for our NICU. We are about 2-3 hours from the blood supplier, depending on traffic.

About 20% of our platelets stocked for CABG procedures are wasted annually. Only approximately 38% are used for CABG patients, but the other 42% gets used by oncology patients. We are required to stock 2 APLTs for each CABG, and we have one physician who occasionally orders 4 APLTs on hold.