Does anyone know if the AABB or CAP allow blood banks to use plastic clot tubes to draw blood bank specimens. Our lab would like to do away with glass tubes as a safety issue.

Thanks

Tony

Absolutely! We had to do a cross study with both glass and plastic tubes. We use EDTA plasma though. No waiting for tubes to clot (especially STATs and dialysis patients). It is the way to go!

We made to switch to plastic a couple years ago. We've had no problems.

We made the switch to plastic tubes several years ago. We use pink top K3EDTA to differentiate from the Hematology specs.

Plasma works great, spins down faster and no fibrin.

Here are some references, some of which are FDA 510k documents:

http://www.fda.gov/CbER/510ksumm/k050036S.pdf

http://www.fda.gov/cber/510ksumm/k980011S.pdf

http://www.gbo.com/documents/Evaluation_K2_K3_Immunohematology_IDMTS_GelTest.pdf

http://www.bd.com/vacutainer/faqs/

You do get "fibrin debris" if the specimen sits in the refrigerator for awhile. When we use prevously refrigerated specimens, we recentrifuge the plasma.

We switched from red top glass to plastic K2EDTA pink tops with no problems. The great part is not having to wait on the sample to clot.

We made the switch to plastic tubes several years ago. We use pink top K3EDTA to differentiate from the Hematology specs.

Plasma works great, spins down faster and no fibrin.

We did the same as Likewine99 several years ago. However, check with the vendor (and the product inserts) to be sure that their plastic pink-top vacutainer tubes are approved for Blood Bank testing; at the time that we switched, only one company's plastic tubes were approved for BB testing....other companies' plastic tubes were not approved for BB.)