According to the Technical manual,you want to give Rh neg units to children and any women of childbearing age if their Rh is unknown or neg. Does anyone have a specific age for "childbearing years"? While setting up our computer system, we needed to choose an age to enter in our alternative Rh table.(so system would allow Rh pos units to be signed out to Rh neg, etc.) We decided to choose 65, I was just wondering if anyone used a specific age or is it more at the disgression of the medical director for each case.

We set child bearing age at 50.

Our's is <50.

Our cutoff is 51.

We also use 50, although we may need to look at this again in the future, given how many people choose to have children late in life...maybe 60 isn't that unreasonable.

Seems like we all went to the same seminar years ago- we use 50 as our cutoff for "child-bearing age." That is a reasonable assumption, and I am not willing to go higher at this time. We have had no one over age 45 give birth in our facility. When that 55 year-old-mom drops in, then I will reconsider.

BC

Our cut-off is 50.

Our age cutoff for childbearing age is < 50 for the purpose of giving Rh pos trauma blood. We are open to providing Rh pos for a younger female who is bleeding us out if we have limited Rh negs available.

My motto, being Rh neg myself, (and within childbearing age criteria above!), if that I'd rather be immunized than dead from lack of blood!

MJ:cool:

We currently us 52 as a cut off.

According to the Technical manual,you want to give Rh neg units to children and any women of childbearing age if their Rh is unknown or neg. Does anyone have a specific age for "childbearing years"? While setting up our computer system, we needed to choose an age to enter in our alternative Rh table.(so system would allow Rh pos units to be signed out to Rh neg, etc.) We decided to choose 65, I was just wondering if anyone used a specific age or is it more at the disgression of the medical director for each case.

Our cut off is at 55 of age.

You make me feel so young!

(Although having a baby at my age would soon make me feel pretty old...)

Our cut-off is 50 but we are considering changing it to 60. Just about anything is possible these days.

In law we have a doctrine called the fertile octogenarian. Under this doctrine, which applies to the law of wills mainly, it is assumed that even an 80-year-old woman is fertile and capable of bearing children. It is a fiction that is used in applying another legal doctrine, the Rule Against Perpetuities, which is so complicated that no lawyer can be held liable for misapplying it. The RAP states, "No interest in property is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later than 21 years after some life in being at the creation of the interest."

All that said, the law is about reasonability, and it is quite reasonable to base a rule on the assumption that the childbearing age ends at age 50. You can not be expected to cover every single contingency. The likelihood that someone 60 years old would give birth is too remote to be a reasonable a assumption.

BC

Ours is currently set at 55, but I personally think 50 should be sufficient; I have only seen one person over 50 ever come in to L&D. If it happened more frequently then I could understand the reasoning for setting it higher.

I also think 50 is reasonable. While we are on this topic, if you set Rh positive red cells as an alternate Rh type for Rh negative recipients (male and "older females"), does your computer system just let you issue out the Rh positive blood without any warning? Does it allow electronic crossmatch of the Rh positive units if the patient otherwise qualifies?

I also think 50 is reasonable. While we are on this topic, if you set Rh positive red cells as an alternate Rh type for Rh negative recipients (male and "older females"), does your computer system just let you issue out the Rh positive blood without any warning? Does it allow electronic crossmatch of the Rh positive units if the patient otherwise qualifies?

We had this very situation not long ago. Our computer will allow us to issue out Rh positive blood to an Rh negative patient irregardless of gender and age but it always gives a warning. It gives us a warning when we issue any blood that is not ABORh specific to the recipient, even if it is ABORh compatible. We then have to select a reason to override this warning, which is good, because it makes us double check ourselves and each other. And yes, it did allow us to do an electronic crossmatch...that is until the anti-D showed up!

We will be going live with Meditech in the next few weeks. It took some building but we got it so it will warn when we crossmatch or issue Rh pos to a neg pt. Our old system, Hemocare, did this automatically. We aren't required to enter a reason. Hmm. Wonder if I could make it do that?

Mabel,

Yes, you can do this with your product assign or issue rule...

I will send you an e-mail with my latest rule.

Linda Frederick

Ten years later, has anyone changed their definition of childbearing age because of people having babies later?  We still use 50.

WE have actually reduced it to 50 in the UK.

If anyone says that it's reasonable for me to have a baby (or even want one) at my age (61) then I'm quite happy to accompany them to the local psychiatrist for happy pills

 

Our system just chose to lower to 50 as well.

We lowered ours within the last couple of years from 55 to 50 for mass transfusion on  the recommendation of the doc in charge of ER. We decided to use that age across the board for other events as well.

Next question.  How do you define age 50?  As soon as she has reached her 50th birthday or not until she passes the age of 50 and has her 51st birthday?

Her 51^st birthday in the UK.