What do you do when you happen upon a donor with a +DAT ?

What type of letter do you send and what type of deferral?

Do you allow future donation and retest the DAT prior to release?

Defer to a "sample only" donor. Retest next sample for DAT, if still +, continue defering. Letter contains insert on what a DAT is and how it may be significant........Then the donor calls and wants to know if they are dying.......then we get to explain a DAT to them. This is being detected frequently with hospitals that crossmatch in GEL.

We all know that you will come across donors who have a transient positive DAT. Our protocol is to place a computer "special process" code on the corresponding donor record. We call it "PDAT" (positive DAT). We generate a daily report that looks for donors who donated with this code. We test any that show up on the report.

Our experience has been that most of these donors do not repeat as positive on subsequent visits. Or test negative after one or two repeat visits. A few will test negative for multiple donations, have one test positive, and then revert back to negative.

Occassionally, we notice a donor who may test repeatedly positive over multiple donations and we inform our collection services that this may be a donor they want to defer from future donations (consistently collecting an unusable product).

For us, it is worthwhile to keep these donors active in the pool as most will provide a usable unit.