Hi, I was wondering if anyone knows a good ( cheap or free) source for continuing ed materials for blood bank. I could like to have a weekly topic with like 5 questions or so for my staff. They are used to the normal patient, and when we do get unusual stuff ( I had a lutheran last week) they panic. I had one tech try to send the lutheran patient and units off for LUa ag typing...... so you see, I need to get some con ed stuff going!

Thanks in advance:D

Pick some topics and let your staff present the CE program (10-15 minutes lecture). It is good for them. Provides valuable speaking experience and blood bank info at the same time . . . build it into their performance programs.

Hi Laura,

Get each staff member to go online with one antibody in tow. Do a search and see what comes up. You'll get abstacts from Transfusion, or ARC Immunohematology Journal and several major publications from Europe and Canada. Weed out the junk by looking for "anything.org" . You'll find a wealth of information and some interesting topics. For example try "anti-Tja" or "anti-Yta".

I could send you a sample of my own blood for your staff to test for CEU's (and for fun). Can you guess what they might find?? :cool:

Weekly topics for educational purposes are great, but questions to go along with them might start to wear on some people. As long as they're informational info only, sounds great. I'll assume that these questions would not be required for competency.

A Lutheran, huh? Most antibodies we get are non-denominational:cool:

I turned out a Lutheran antibody once and the OB asked me if we had an anti-jewish antibody too. Then he said, "I can say that, because I'm Jewish."

I come from a whole family of A intermediates but I am not sure I want to volunteer my blood to everyone on this forum--I might run dry!

University of Alberta used to have some good stuff on their TraQ (or whatever it was called) program. Does anyone know it is still there?

Yes it is still there. They do have very interesting case studies.

University of Washington has a great on line training site. medtraining.org. Minimal $$

You can register all your staff as individuals. Quick quizzes - 20 minutes or so. All topics in Lab Med covered, including patient ID and phleb. Updated quarterly. Define yourself as site administrator and you can check all your employees scores and proficiency. We registered 180 techs for under $1000.

Be aware on UW quizzes that the answers are based on their policies, not always general practice. I never could get 100% on them! (Obviously, there's something wrong with the test, not me.)

Another good idea is to pull your own patient workups and use them as teaching tools. I somtimes just give out a copy of some of the work and list a bunch of questions about the workup. Gives techs a chance to try and figure out how best to proceed when faced with a particular type of problem. An example would be a patient with a high freq antibody. I will ask things like "What methods could you use to rule out all common allos?" Techs get continuing ed credit for completing the questions and sitting for a quick review.

I agree Mabel, some of the questions are specific to someone else's policies. I like the case study idea.