I am pleased to announce that the physician's office laboratory where I am employed successfully passed inspection to open our blood bank. I had posted earlier in the year asking if anyone out there had ever seen or heard of a POL with a blood bank and received no responses. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to do so. Now we wait for our state license to be issued and we will be crossmatching and transfusing in our own office.

Please, if anyone else knows of this happening any place else in the U.S. let me know.

Thank you Blood Bank Talk for all of the advice I have sought while writing procedures! Thank you to all the blood bankers out there as well as your posts were invaluable.

I'm curious, what kind of patients will you be transfusing?

John,

We have a very large, active, Hematology/Oncology department. I would say the majority of the patients are from that area. They are multiply transfused and we have quite a few antibody patients. That area makes up about 99% of the transfusions. The others are from the G/I docs, internists and family practitioners.

Our facility has about 120 physicians. Our fully accredited lab rivals the volume of a 350 bed hospital.

Look for an article about us in the September issue of MLO!

That's kind of what I thought. Mostly patients that would have come to me as an outpatient transfusion will be staying with you. Not a bad idea.

Congratulations on appearing to break new ground in an area where that is very difficult to do sometimes. I'll look forward to the article. Keep us posted on how things go.

:pcproblem

Sounds pretty cool. Who's your blood supplier?

Congratulations!

Congratulations! we are similar in that we are a POL and a Blood Donation Center and associated with a large Heme/Onc program. Good luck in your endeavor.

Thank you all for your good wishes! Our supplier is Florida's Blood Centers in Orlando Florida. We opened for business on August 18 and it feels great to be on the bench again..Whewww.. that was a long 6 months. I have never been off the bench for that length of time.

Thanks again to BB Talk and my fellow blood bankers!

Hello all. Here is a link to the September MLO cover story, just copy and paste. My facility follows the article about the military. I am the blood bank supervisor at MIMA. Thanks again to all of you for the information posted on this site. It helped me write procedures, plan the design and start a blood bank from "scratch"! Kim

http://www.mlo-online.com/articles/0908/0908cover_story.pdf

Congratulation.

Good Luck.

Congratulations! We have a very active Cancer Center and I've often thought it would lend itself well to what you have done.

I hope things go well for your new service.