Our reference lab.does culture for all blood component as part of their QC every mos.AABB Standard says we should have a policy in detecting bacterial contamination for platelets before transfusion.In urgent cases,wherein the time is limited ,so what happen is to issue and no bacterial detection done for platelets.(we don't have automatic culture machine that will detect the presence of bacteria in platelets)Pls.teach me what to do.We are now on the process for AABB accreditation.

This sounds like a simple procedural exception. Your medical director and approve deviations from your standard policies (e.g. no bacterial screening pre-transfusion) provided they document sound medical judgment BEFORE the deviation occurs. Any facility that uses granulocytes has to have something like this in place because granulocytes do not have a complete set or donor testing before they must be used. At my facility we document these deviations in our occurrence management process.

Thank you Frank,'am going to discuss it to our medical director .

We get three types of platelet products:

Platelet pheresis and pooled platelets from our supplier are cultured.

Single donor platelets that we pool are not. For those we test a segment for Glucose and pH using a urine dipstick. If bacteria are present, the Glucose will be low <250 and the pH will be acidic 5 or 6. We then reject those units and culture them. So far, all the units we've rejected never grew anything. We return those units for credit.

In doing culture for platelets Is there any required volume needed to perform the test? or the same as in blood c/s?

Cultures should be done with blood culture bottles. The volume is whatever you can get out of the pigtails (which is less than volume for blood cultures)

Thank you for the information