This is a question for medium-small blood centers. We are a blood center that does approx. 30,000 collections/year. We do some consultation/apheresis/whole blood and recovered plasma. All donor testing is sent out. I have limited staff that is overwhelmed by the on-call for consultation. There is not quite enough consultation to make a evening/night shift options viable. Without dropping the consultation (not really an option), I am stuck.

How do others handle staffing for medium sized donor centers?

Do you do any additional consultation?

Any suggestions on increasing services so you could have more staff? I think doing more antibody consultation for area hospitals is a good option but I am not sure if we would have to be an IRL to do this.

If anybody has any good staffing suggestions I would really love to hear what you have done. Thanks!

We only collect about 85,000 a year and do quite a bit of testing for our smaller hospitals. One of the major things we did for our on-call techs was to only come in for emergency work-ups. This can be tricky to determine what is "emergency". We usually let the hospital tell us what is going on with the patient and go from there. Ab workup call on Mon. night for knee replacememt on Wed. is obviously going to wait till morning. We always go for the more cautious decision. When in doubt.....come in. More info about what testing you do may make my answere more helpful. On-call is always a tricky subject. We have had hospitals lie a couple of times to keep the docs from being mad at them and that is always a problem.

Love the avatar! Huge Calvin and Bloom County fan from the 80's.....I'm getting old.(sigh)